your fear becomes holy, your marriage frail. you decide mine will ruin yours. your sentences pervert scripture. plagiarize what you believe is real. what you claim to conjure you want god to believe. if no one else loves you why should he?
your fear becomes holy, 2 amen. let me turn your heads: jesus never married, had disciples: men. judas turned against him. jealousy comes from the bed. if i can’t have you no one can.
These two poems appear in John Compton’s new book the castration of a minor god, available from Ghost City Press
“the castration of a minor god” is built like a classic opera, composed of many lyric passages full of strange and powerful images cast in words, where dresses of flames mix horrifically with our culture’s dishonesty and secret perversion to cast a searchlight onto earth from the heavens above where this thing called god tells us to love one another, fully, completely, without exception. Compton’s short book of poems answers the implicit and explicit questions that other Book poses. Without apology or fear, anger is met with anger, love with love. While sometimes his metaphors go too far, other times the images created are perfectly beautiful and compelling. This is a book that embraces what was forbidden love and shows the reader the universality of fear, desire, and belonging.
-Fred Dodsworth, Dodsworth Books
About the Author: john compton (b. 1987) is a gay poet who lives in Kentucky. He lives in a tiny town with his husband Josh and their dogs and cats.
Image Credit: Ernst Ludwig Kirchner “Head of Dr. Bauer” (1921) Public domain image courtesy of Artvee.
As It Ought To Be 