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Death by Chocolate
By Cindy Childress
June 7, 2004
It's not a sin, so he sits
and watches Andy Griffith marathons
every night
his hands march
through peanut M & M's and popcorn, Little Debbie Cakes and fudge
to the ten o’clock news.
No idea bigger than a commercial
exists here,
and sex is what they sell with vacuum cleaners
far away from his sterile room
sterile wife sterile children sterile liquor cabinet,
and it is a sin to dance. A sin to laugh
at the funniest jokes.
A sin to think this isn't natural
carmel cremes, chocolate chips, Doritos.
How many cakes and fries will
it take
to erase his mind?
Gluttony is the deadly sin
his congregation doesn't target
for fear of implicating their potluck buffets
and girdles; they crow about how prosperous
God’s made them
into pigs snorting over a trough.
The man of the chair accepts his hourly lot
of inactivity exchanged
to his beloved long-legged evangelist.
She binds his hands with dinner menus
and the vague realization that he's too fat
to find an affair,
and it’s so pointless to
struggle
when you've agreed not to fight,
but to let the winner take all
the cable channels
and keep only ones
with shreds of literary decency.
The bad guy always loses,
and heaven is reserved for the hero
savior salvation it’s black and it’s white,
and the only gray he sees is on screen
when the antennae needs adjusting.
ninetyandnine.com
© 2004,
Cindy Childress
----------
Cindy Childress
spent her kindergarten days in the “Bad Corner” because she colored outside the
lines. She is currently a Ph.D. student in creative writing at the University of
Louisiana at Lafayette. She also hosts a monthly poetry reading, Breathing
Space, and will co-chair the Graduate Conference on Language and Literature in
2005. |
