(((Shylock))) To Netanyahu by Jeremy Radin

"God is lonely & it’s your fault."

(((Shylock))) To Netanyahu
by Jeremy Radin

God is lonely & it’s your fault.
At the breakfast table you have forgotten
God, & growling about your dry cleaning
& certainly reviewing your various
intelligence reports. God is lonely
though you send to the realms reams
of gardeners & poets & schoolchildren,
though you hoard, as if possessed,
the tools that fill God’s rooms—
it’s not what God wants. God wants you.
God longs for you, Benjamin, sad Bibi,
just as God has longed for every bloodless
lizard wreaking havoc in the celestial desert.
As you writhe amongst your underlings,
as they suck the petroleum out of your ass
at the climax of your unctuous orgies
God watches the bombs fall onto the city,
onto hospitals & pigeons & billions
of olives, which you make every effort
to send in your stead, to send instead
of sending yourself, because you know that what
God wants to say to you, & you know you’ll be
from history deleted by the saying, it’s why you say
God’s name so often, so loudly, which makes
God so terribly lonely. When you say God’s name
each God that leaves your sloganeer’s mouth
pushes God a little further away, into the loneliness
to which you have devoted yourself, the loneliness
you long for, but which cannot ever be yours
because everywhere you look, look!—all
you have killed (& all you cannot) keeping
you, keeping you company.

First published in Rejected Lit Magazine, Issue 11.