George Elliott Clarke (1960-)
Judas: A Biography
1 You sported the silks that Christ never wore –
2A svelte, scarlet tie for every white suit,
3And pounded your Bible to press your points.
4Your mouth crammed with fine words, you hymned sermons
5That stirred poor folk to sign over welfare cheques.
6When you paraded, macho, in tight jeans,
7And strangled guitars, thin, nubile debs wept
8And wrung their tear-soaked hair upon your feet.
9 Then, still greedy, you hawked dry snow – cocaine –
10And gulled and pimped tender, small breasted-girls.
11When Mary, your fine whore, quit you for Christ,
12You raged: Blood beat in your skull like a drum.
13You had Christ jailed, crowned with barbed-wire, shocked,
14Then strung with piano wire from a lamppost.
Notes
7] debs: debutantes, eligible young women.
Online text copyright © 2009, Ian Lancashire (the Department of English) and the University of Toronto.
This poem cannot be published anywhere without the written consent of George Elliott Clarke or the Pottersfield Press permissions department.
Published by the Web Development Group, Information Technology Services, University of Toronto Libraries.
Original text: Lush Dreams, Blue Exile: Fugitive Poems: 1978-1993 (Lawrencetown Beach, NS: Pottersfield Press, 1994): 33.
RPO poem editor: Ian Lancashire
RP edition: 2004
Recent editing: 1:2004/7/22
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