She was like a shattered Judas,

born to be glued back together

with corpse money from Akeldama

and reassembled as the sin of her tribe

                    Watch her now:

fumbling at a cigarette in a ditched stripmall

raspy ruaḥ panting sheets of smoke

She slept on a bench today, who’d’ve thunk it?

and worshipped the false idols on her phone

          She was like the castoff Aaron,

a beacon tinted gold

when the cow started grooving

blunting her with broken pacts

                    I envy her style:

punching a tree ‘till she screamed god-raw

dragged home to an empty bottle

and stuffing it with shivering liqueur 

topped with a chicken-scratch swan-song

          She was like Lot’s wife

Salty, fleeing from crackling past,

unable to look towards indigo Zoar

She would water the angel-gagged land

                    It was too much for her:

a wayside swerved into woods,

that old cat blazing in her head

She remembered her name was Shira

and swallowed too dry to speak it

          She was like the Ram

A funny joke; a scapegoat

The kind that Abraham shanked

for his shackled son

                    Her blood don't spill:

it freezes atop Moriyyah and Sinai

those ghost peaks and puffed chests

When she fell, she fell way down

and scraped the moon with slit wrists

          She was like withered Moshe

who croaked believing he had any control

He reddened waters, slammed stone breath,

but Mount Nebo swallowed his pride and mitzvot

                    She didn't leave quietly:

with bandaged hands, she wrapped nylon 

'round a hook; a hanging home

She wasn't like them, she wasn't, she wasn't

She was.

          She was a shattered Judas

dangling in a dank room on the age of guilt

          She was me

staring at the rope