Deeper Issues?

The Bible has some interesting characters.

We can see in stanzas and rhymes

How they might have received some help

If they'd been living in modern times.

 

Lot, for example, had a drinking problem.

The man got drunk and slept with his daughter.

Actually with two! So, dear Lot:

Go to A.A. and stick with water.

An inferiority complex

Must have driven the angry Cain.

No matter what he did, he always

Seemed to incur God's disdain.

 

In searching for pairs of all animals on earth,

Noah's compulsion crossed the border

Of what today we would call

An obsessive-compulsive personality disorder.

 

Saul had to be extremely bipolar.

Talk about mood swings! On different occasions

He tried to kill David, who luckily escaped

By the skin of his teeth and with no abrasions.

 

If someone--like Solomon--had seven hundred wives

And three hundred concubines, we'd tend to say

That he had a number of serious issues,

But we don't want to go there today.

 

Moses talked to a burning bush,

Samuel and Elijah heard voices that told them

What to do. Now we'd say they were

Schizophrenic if voices controlled them.

Harold was really into himself;

He had to be highly narcissistic.

When Paul was persecuting the Christians,

His behavior was rather sadistic.

 

Without A.A. or psychiatrists,

Or drugs like Prozac, Zoloft, thorazine,

Valium, Haldol, Abilify, Lithium,

Seroquel, Xanax, Paxil, and clozapine,

 

Our Biblical characters were on their own--

To fend for themselves to carry out their mission,

Without medical insurance and someone

To say, "Get thee to a physician."

 

(2-12-15)

Reviews

[Shawn Jahaffie]

This made me smile. It's difficult to be both humorous and profound in poetry. Normally I can't stand rhyming, symmetrical poetry because the forced rhymes and stilted sentence structure both slap me in the face first thing, but your rhyme scheme seemed very natural, and I even stopped noticing it after a stanza or two. There's also the giving of the ten commandments on Mt Sinai to Moses, where there is a known source of psilocybin mushrooms nearby. So who knows? I hope this poem gets more reads :)