Clockwork Blasphemy

Hello my little piece of laminated, fragile hope. Adorned with your garish array of bright, mismatched colors and symbols, I find you in the hands of many a passerby. Usually, in the callused, worn hands of whom I can only wish would cease to indulge in your false claims and exclamations. You shed layers only to reveal more sequentially meaningless characters and symbols. They promulgate thoughts of hopelessness, more roadblocks, more intrinsically “bad karma” or a divinely ordained dismal fate. Minimal as your contribution of sadness may be to the daily, bitter heaps of trials, tribulations, wounded bones and bleeding hearts, your fraction is just as sinister. Because it piles up. You know that your ashes, scattered in the wind, on the floor and out the window could congeal from many many crevices to form a slippery black mountain of despair with one shining, rarely attainable diamond at the crest.

Yet, they make a minor deity out of you still. You are concocted and perpetuated with a recipe that includes sacrificed earnings, blood, sweat and tears, mixed with greater hopes for their children, homelands, forgotten languages, birthrights, distant loved ones and the desire to retrieve whatever is left of their essential humanity. Like clockwork blasphemy they reach for you even if they reach for nothing else. On good days, maybe you are plucked and delivered alongside a pack of cigarettes that will replace meals and barely satiate hunger, perhaps a cheap cup of burned coffee, even an hours-old piece of bread and meat fresh off the glare of a heat lamp and hot metal rods. And in my own observation of your patrons, I see the ubiquitous crying out for hope, for mercy, for blessings from God – for a breath of relief, for once, at last, but probably – never.