MY SILLY POEMS

Depending on the day
or the year
or the decade
or who’s holding the pen
or how young and doe-eyed Robin is
when he clutches his cape and begs:
come on, dance!

Robin changes more than Batman does,
but Robin always dances,
and he loves to tell stories
of how Batman used to dance.
Nobody ever believes him when he does,
they only think: poor Robin. He’s living in a world
where Batman danced,
where Batman smiled,
where Batman called him “chum”.
I mean: who says “chum” anymore? Really,
I’m sure Robin is lying when he says that
Batman once called him “chum”
and smiled
and danced.
But Robin isn't lying—
it’s just that decades that they haven’t seen have passed
and the pen of the author that plays with them
inks thick black lines going and ungoing
doing and undoing
winding and unwinding like Trojan prophecy
then it changes hands
so someone else can have their fun.
The poor suckers in Gothamn think that nothing is different,
the poor god damned suckers,
being choked to death by the tip of a pen
they can’t even see,
and then being brought back to life
when the pen draws their windpipe intact again,
and still they think: poor Robin,
he thinks Batman used to dance.

You hold your hand out to me.
Come on, you say, as the music
thumps its way between our ribs
and behind our eyes,
come on, dance!
I say: hah! I don’t dance,
and you,
with the lights painting you
red green and yellow,
and the shadows casting a line over your bright eyes,
you look at me delightedly,
like you cannot wait to tell me this,
and say:
even Batman dances!

Judas Iscariot is marching me down to Hell and speaking to me in the tough-love tone of an older brother who’s being real holier-than-thou even though all he’s done all day is play FIFA and smoke weed on the balcony. “Listen, kid,” he says, waving a hand with a flippancy you would think was born in the late twentieth century, “it’s not your fault, all those good people you hurt. Not really. Sometimes the good only make the bad worse. That’s nobody’s fault but theirs. If they were so good, they wouldn’t make us pay for it, huh?” He says it with such god damn conviction, but the words mean very little because it’s clear that he’s trying to convince himself as much as he’s trying to convince me, and it’s clearer yet that he still loves Jesus so much that it aches; loves him naturally, like he doesn’t even know he does, the way he loves his own right hand. More, probably, than a hand or a foot or any other limb or organ, because they say Judas was ready to take on God Himself in his love for Jesus. What’s a right hand or a heart to a love like that?

I think about how bad he loved Jesus. Loves Jesus. I think about how bad God fucked him. I think about how it wasn’t really his fault, none of it, except for that it was. It really was. Well, what is fault, anyway? I ask him: “Is that how you live with it? All the grief you have still?” and he shoots me a sidelong glance, his mouth wrenched into a displeased moue, but he doesn’t answer my question, which is itself an answer. In my mind I see him on his knees in front of the Samhedrin, holding out his shaking, silver-filled hands, speaking through clenched teeth as not to weep, begging with his eyes fixed on the ground by their pristine fucking feet: “Just take it back. He’s my friend. Just let him go—just take your fucking money back and bring him out here to me.” How ridiculous, the futility of it! As though he could have undone it. As though he could have ever been anything else. I look at him biting the inside of his cheek as we walk and understand it all very simply: it has never mattered how much I weep and gnash my teeth over my own sins. After all, Judas will always be Judas, and Jesus will always be Jesus. The good love the wicked because they’re good, and the wicked love the good because they’re damned.