Poetry Sunday: The Obscenity Prayer


This poem, I think, expresses, with a kind of dark and twisted humor, the psychic pain or confusion which even the most devout may feel from time to time.

The Obscenity Prayer
by Mary Karr

Our falter, whose art is Heavy,
Halloween be thy name.
Your kingdom’s numb
your children dumb on earth
moldy bread unleavened.
Give us this day our
wayward dead.
And give us our
asses as we forgive those
who ass against us.
And speed us not
into wimp nation
nor bequiver us
with needles, for thine
is the flimflam and the sour,
and the same fucking
story in leather
for never and ever.
Ah: gin.

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