Said the Devil to Lil Nas X Shoe Burners by Robert Lashley
“Who would believe that you loved me?
Who would believe that you kept my name?”
A poem by Robert Lashley
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Said the Devil to Lil Nas X Shoe Burners
-with a Nod to Lucille Clifton and James Rosensweig
Who would believe that you loved me?
Who would believe that you kept my name?
Whispers turn to screams over broken seals
up and around bloody shoe caskets.
At the stake of your shoe tags comes
another price.
At the moment I was almost erased.
Have I always been there?
In your head? (In your heart)?
The agent in your stories?
The builder of your frames?
The center of the songs you set
in his gloried, holy name?
The dark that all but held the light
in your church day constellations?
The shadow man that held and made
your virtual signal protestations?
The reanimating corpse you raised
atop your Galilees and caves?
Your second Christ of effigies,
of burnt kicks which you praise?
Unafraid of the offering and the rocking cradle,
beasts and their image usurp all authorities.
A thousand years flash in an ember’s sparkle
—the two-pointed arrow of your piety.
Reality and witness descend into the smoke
that upturns millennia of bones,
that chokes witness in praise, dances
shadow hands.
Morning flips its axis until an endless loop
of crucifixion marches past and gone.
Who-in the fire-could dream that you could take
Me
as your only begotten son?
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Header image courtesy of Agent X. To view his artist feature, go here.
Robert Lashley is a writer and activist. He was a 2016 Jack Straw Fellow, Artist Trust Fellow, and a nominee for a Stranger Genius Award. He has had work published in The Seattle Review of Books, NAILED, Poetry Northwest, McSweeney’s, and The Cascadia Review. His poetry was also featured in such anthologies as Many Trails to The Summitt, Foot Bridge Above the Falls, Get Lit, Make It True, and It Was Written. His previous books include THE HOMEBOY SONGS (Small Doggies Press, 2014), and UP SOUTH (Small Doggies Press, 2017). In 2019, The Homeboy Songs was named by Entropy Magazine as one of the 25 most essential books to come out of the Seattle area.
