I’m Not Yet Ready

I’m Not Yet Ready

by Darren Edwards


Sitting at the desk in my office,
I watched a dark chocolate brown
spider scratching its way across
the wall just above my window.

It came to me at that moment
the sudden flash of revelation
the deft imprint of knowing
when I will be ready for heaven.

It has nothing to do with sheltering
the poor or feeding the hungry,
there are no number of babies
I can save from burning buildings,
or amount of blistered, cracked and bloodied
toes from long desert pilgrimages
that will open that great gate.
Stitching my lips closed with a vow of silence,
starving myself until the bend of my belly has turned inward,
castration, flagellation, revelation, religious participation,
and mummification would all serve me to no avail.

No, the day I’ll be ready for heaven
the day I will ride up into the sky on an
escalator of glass with silver streamers
and those little glittery sparkly squares
they use to decorate high school dances,
and angels like Dino and Frank will
welcome me home in a chorus of
Ain’t That a Kick in the Head?
that day,
that glorious gold trimmed
Mother Teresa resting on a futon day
that fresh and clean like the Downy bear day,

that will be the day
my eyes scroll along the wall
above my window
and I let the little
eight legged bastard
live.


-refers to the line “crawling like babies” in Val B Russell’s poem Cockroaches and White Bread