Tug Dumbly # 58 - Some Questions on Prayer

Some Questions on Prayer

Do prayers have epicentres – prayer bombs, 
with a blast zone, a radiation fringe?

Can you cast your prayer net too wide, 
spread it, like jam, too thin?

Is a prayer for all a prayer for none? 
Is it best to start small, praying for your next breath,
building up your prayer muscle 

till it moves mountains?

Are prayers squeaked in private places 
better heard than hairy-chested prayers  

publicly bellowed by shining faces? 

Is there a prayer queue, first in first served – ‘
take a ticket, ma’am, we’ll be with you soon’ – 
or a ‘first-shall-be-last’ hierarchy, with the 
starveling’s prayer for a cup of rice
heard before the mogul’s plea
for his cancerous wife?

Does it run on merit, need, privilege? 
Can you accrue frequent praying points,

earn entry to a first-class pray-ers lounge
by racking up prayer miles?

Is there a Lost & Dead Prayer office, 
a Prayer Pound, where stray prayers go

to gather dust and die?

Are ill-wish prayers for others frowned upon? 
Or are they referred to the Pagan Department?

Is prayer more effective when selflessly directed? 
And does this bank cookies in your personal prayer jar? 
And is this discounted as self-serving?

Is a prayer’s potency dependent upon 
the goodness or badness of the target?

Can the rich skip a tedious lifetime of prayer 
just by building a basilica? 
Can they invest in prayers like shares, 
have prayer portfolios, bulk-buy them 
from prayer sweat shops where exploited urchins 
roll prayers like cigars on skinny brown thighs, 
to be choofed by plutocrats smoke-signaling a market rise?

Is there a prayer economy? 
Can you pre-invest, pre-buy, time-share prayer,

get in the red, the black, 
have a prayer surplus or deficit?

Can prayers be outsourced, exhorted and bought? 
Are there pay-for-pray schemes with prayers 
tailored to order as those seeking Indulgences thought?

Can unwanted prayers be donated to needy homes, 
be returned, exchanged, re-gifted, vouchered,
wrapped, given as ‘get-out-of-hell-free’ cards
to be smashed open, like fire alarms, by desperate saps?

Can you drop a prayer in the cup of a beggar 
who says brother, can you spare a prayer?
Can you flick them like fag butts at bums,
toss them to tramps like a dog a bone?

In times of glut do prayers rot and drop like fruit 
from trees? Do they plough in the crop, throw back 
the catch, bulldoze mounds of rotting prayers to feed flies?

Can prayers cause collateral damage, 
hit the wrong target like a mis-shot cupid’s arrow? 
Can ungrateful recipients have prayers rescinded 
by a team of repo angels?

Should there be a prayer cooling-off period 
so that hasty and regretted prayers can be undone? 
Or are prayers, once launched, unrecallable, 
like the bomber in Dr Strangelove?

Ought prayers be offered in an archaic tongue 
of old-timey thous, thys and thees? 
Should they be made on the knees, like a monk 
bent in sackcloth and mumbling Latin on the cold 
stone floor of a medieval monastery at dawn, 
squeezing a thistle in each fist, kissing a rosary 
and dressed in a thorn girdle and hairshirt stained 
with the bleeding stripes of a penitent flagellant?

Or are prayers just as amen-able when, say, 
offered nude, galloping double with your lover, 
bareback on a horse along the crashing surfline 
of a moonlit Polynesian beach, on your way 
to a tropical orgy in the compound of the chief?

Does god get a kick from our suffering show? 
Does all our terrible moth-eaten need 
convince her of any cause?

Or does she find it all a bit of a yawn, 
a groveling display that demeans us both?

Anyway, why bother acting? 
God apparently sees clean through the heart in any case. 
Whether you utter the prayer, or the prayer utters you, 
she can read the back of your face.

Who knows, maybe god’s a field peasant, 
picking prayers like a quota of cotton

or maybe she just drops in balls and spins the wheel 
for a lottery, calls a game of prayer bingo.

Please sent answers to these questions 
at your earliest possible convenience, 
I pray.