The Ballad of the Bad Clergy

And once in every while on late Friday nights due,

The melancholic Bad Clergy go out for a jest or two,

For their resurrection, these pilgrimages they make,

Not for the good Jesus but for their own mind’s sake,

Of them, whose feelings range beyond holy bounds,

Whose clergy’s sinning pile high in septic mounds,

From late Fridee nights and irreverent late blessings,

The poor faithful, how they come in fancy dressings,

And sing and pray, gaspers leaking at Sunday Mass,

Oh how they seek usury, what is holy, what is crass!

These fathers sleep fitfully with flicking beady eyes,

Filled with guilt to make the dumbest atheist feel wise,

So pricked is their conscience, so are they demented,

This family of limpid priests, their kindness be rented,

Buster Keatons, choked by dog collars of dirty white,

Chosen shepherds, whom God yelled for overnight,

Fogged by dense theology so might they bedazzle

The faithful, and hound them into a brain frazzle.

 

They exorcise free will on night owl wanderings,

Around Granville streets and its nether hauntings,

The Lag Motor privy to byways of the mystery tour,

In mental illness, their wanderings begin with a lure,

They’ll chat in flash stolen from James Hardy Vaux,

A scoundrel, a conniver, who’d unbetty the know,

The chat which keeps them from the ordinary folk,

Little devils, them in-crowding, them in on the joke,

They’ll remove their gym boots for when they rest,

Have them pointing towards Blacktown far west,

There’s family there, who are as Bad Clergy as them,

Pimply pustulates regurgitating liturgies in phlegm,

Nameless mates collecting punned names of father,

Their romantic intimacy is with the Virgin Mother,

These old boys you might have known and met,

Given surnames when God lost to the Devil in a bet,

Muldoon, and Kelly and Mahone and Clancy,

Who’s first of the Bad Clergy to tickle your fancy?

 

Is it Clancy? the self-managed good man of faith,

Poor in his holy thoughts, the Christ’s mere wraith,

His semenarian disgraces too fraught to mention,

Confessed of in darkness, as is his god’s intention,

But pious be he, the Christ's gospel he’ll preach,

Loudly and coarsely, to waxed in ears he’ll reach,

His parishioners benign, and assuredly supine,

Much of the catholic bible he’ll sarcastically refine,

To suit his listless and formless sense of doubt,

Sin is this man’s brother; following him about,

Lecturing ignobly, biting his tongue upon a gaffe,

He’s all mime, the Sunday preacher who’s naff,

From gospel corners he fools with words caught,

Airing them, from rudest Satan they’ve been bought,

And if the liturgy rusts, what should the ‘oly bible do?

If a priest be foul, where can the sad afeared go?

Trust good Clancy; it’s them Prottos that be lewd,

Comics of the true faith, they preach to the rude,

And shame it is, if a catholic priest cannot reap,

Be he a shitty shepherd tending clean sheep,

Ought then that good Clancy have love to give?

By his altar activities, show his sheep how to live,

In mass and the old method of sulphur and fire,

To frighten his poor sheep, welcomed into a mire

This priest whose secrets God wills to withhold,

Dispensing penances coated with impure gold,

For the Catholic wolf must project love to mislead,

Clancy, a mere shepherd, is vague on the creed,

Straight black hair as thick as a hangman’s rope,

His skin pallor akin to the colour of a bag of dope,

Such glaring eyes has he, doubters he’ll ensnare,

Not for their salvation, his faith is a cynical lair,

Whose voice is that of a traumatised goat,

His loneliness shining like a lighthouse remote;

 

Muldoon offers his passions to the duplicitous,

His rude manner is hot spiced with the ridiculous,

The faux Pope he’d rather snub for a capsicum,

In dreams he leads the pillage of the Vatican,

Heated in bed, he’s as horny as a white rabbit,

Himself alone, admiring the beast, his habit,

He does love fat pizzas, and fizzy tar that’s nice,

His sin of gluttony he names his delightful vice,

There’s never fire, nor calamity in his speech,

For retardation, the liturgy demands his reach,

That he might justify his savoury penances,

And be in charge of Jesus’ white sentences,

In confession, and wherever else he is called

By his Bishop, blind eye turned, unappalled,

For Muldoon was chosen to infer confession,

If it gets hot, his discomforts end the session

With absolution, the catholic slap on the back,

Sin again, these sinners, and they’ll be right back,

As God’s red hand he’ll either caress or strangle,

As God’s mouthpiece he’ll enlighten or mangle

Minds which willingly, as do priests cynically,

Bind themselves to a faith, bespoken cryptically,

His shame is healed by the faithfuls’ penance,

They pray for him as though it’s their vengeance,

Some dissent, but Muldoon will have his meal,

Theology impedes him knowing how others feel,

For he is a priest who had violated a nun,

Chaste and pregnant she had nowhere to run,

She birthed the bastard in a barren park,

Muldoon confessed that he’d made his mark,

Proving to nature that he can create a being,

Proving to god that the art of catholic fleeing

From hypocrisy, his church’s bold tradition,

Dismissing doubt as though a contradiction,

How easy is it to ask a phantom to forgive,

One waited for to come again and to live,

The burdens of priesthood are much to bear,

It is god’s will the church was chosen to dare

The Devil, to ever wreak havoc on this world,

And god fearing damnation will be hurled

On the bleeders, as punishment for their sins,

The wicked women, who cause of all men’s sins;

 

That Kelly met the air in his mother’s blood,

When Kelly is praying he can taste the blood,

A slender, problematic soul, in need of a soak,

He fears not god’s wrath, belief is but a joke,

He has his swine, his herd, his people to teach,

It is not god but he, who is far out of reach,

He is of an ilk whose mental illness is sane,

Neither swearing nor Christianity be his bane,

His mind is that of fish swimming be cradled,

And that of miracles which afflict the disabled,

His consolations are as toothy as a rake,

When ordained he knew it was a mistake,

Looking sallow, hollow man, he takes his place

In the sacristy, in the confessional, out of place,

Fully threadbare of his mission to convert,

With impunity he’s reasoned he’ll subvert

The Church, with its propensity for deceit,

No priest is wise until his atheism is complete,

Then he is utterly free to bless and pretend,

That before death there is a lovely end

To the fear of it, for a clean heaven awaits,

Full of angels, do-gooders and likely mates,

Kelly, the catholic priest, out of his league,

Like a spiritual guide who misspells intrigue,

How shall the world he lives in be fully served?

Lest Kelly have the swank in him reserved

For the impressionable, gone out of his mind,

A right prickasaur, desperate to unwind,

Through pricking and hunting for the female,

And no 10th commandment shall prevail,

A lust-knot to the greater end for arse,

His head is bald, shining like plate glass,

And etched in his face, as has been anointed

A man full of ecclesiastical fat and vaunted,

Whose disbelieving eyes roll in his head

Steam pressured as though a furnace of lead,

His manner supple, his attitude an old estate

Now certainly he comes across a fair prelate

To his family brethren scoffing at suggestions,

That they should face scrutiny and the questions;

 

And about Mahone, who is known to be nifty

With biblical words, but with salvation is thrifty,

A jester priest who finds it easier to fool

Than convince believers, who are being fooled,

His sermons drooped with the truth held low,

He surmises, should he stay or should he go,

A bone head has he, with a homeless stare,

Conscious of the right garb that he should wear,

A crucifix on his chest of a blackened sheen,

On the virgin’s breast he hankers for a wean,

It is easy for him, forgiver, to dish out penance,

Let he who is possessed by guilt pass sentence,

And he does, and all the better with relish,

Perverted he, with this strange kind of fetish,

The pleasure of seeing people weeping

For sinning, whose hope for eternal sleeping

Will be boosted in the confessional box,

Though salvation ends with the devil’s pox,

The everlasting stain developed in Eden,

Now the best word to rhyme here is Sweden,

A place where Mahone dreams of going,

Where the air is cold and blond hair is flowing,

Surgeons could do something with his warts,

How they mark out his subversive thoughts!

One who muses through his nostrils wide,

Sometimes he erupts and looks like Jesus’ side,

He wonders if this is a mysterious sign,

Whether his faith is malignant or benign,

And rage he can, only to give up a whelp,

And then his bishop can bother to offer help,

To leave theology sweet upon the tongue,

And in his harping, clean away the dung

Filling his brain, his head twirking aright,

As do the big stars of a Christmas night,

In his life so far, he feels that cold disconnect,

Only with his dirty Family can he reconnect,

But only Jesus can read into their disarray,

Mahone’s face is good, though not quite gay,

For he is a late comer to works on command,

The Clergy who carry their work in remand.

 

And when noticed by the curia for badly doing it,

They’ll be bog men just climbed out of a tar pit,

The smelly, the pure and the sceptics alike avoid

These bad ones, dismissed, and quietly deployed

To far off parishes, on the fringes of desolation,

Where faith is hardest to keep in isolation,

And abandoned without the slightest whim,

These poorly priests whose health bodes grim.