When the Devil Talks Like God

He’s got enough hands

To make it work

Don’t be a fool

Be a fool

And get fooled

That’s all people do these days

Ride up to the ladder

And see how tall

See how--
See how it all

Pans out

I cut my nails yesterday

Trying to claw my way

Out of hell

Two coffins deep
And I still have dirt

Under my fingernails

And you

Want me

To take these muddy hands

And put ‘em together

To pray?

I can’t do that I’m afraid

Obey and okay

But I can’t

Send up prayers to god

With filthy hands

My mother used to be the one

To tell us

To wash our hands

Daddy didn’t

Daddy couldn’t scrape the rust off

No matter how hard

He tried

And the rust

Used to look

Like sin to me

Back when I was little

I thought my Dad must have been

Real bad

To have hands like that

I didn’t know that evil men

Keep clean palms

And pristine fingernails

I didn’t know

That when you send a prayer up
Covered in dirt

God’ll know you were a person

Who worked

For what they got

And God’ll be proud of you for that

I didn’t know

That the softest hand

You’ll ever feel in your life

Is probably going to be coated with grime

Because it reached into the darkest inferno

To pull you out

And back into the light

My mother used to stand over us

While we were washing our hands

And she’d ask us

What our day was like us

And who talked to us that day

We’d tell her about our teachers

And our friends

And the man who came to the door

Trying to sell us Bibles

‘What’d he say to you,’ she asked

We told her

He wanted to know

If our parents were home

And when we said they weren’t

Because our mother was at the market

And our dad was doing double shifts

He kind of smiled at us

And asked if he could come in

‘But you didn’t let him in, right?’

‘No, ma’am, we didn’t.’

I remember how nice his voice sounded

How low, the timbre

The way he cut his ‘t’s

And slit his ‘r’s

I remember his pretty pink hand

Resting on the doorframe

Looking at my sister

And then at me

Later that night, I got into bed with my mom

My dad asleep downstairs on the couch

Watching tv

I told her how nice the man spoke

And how clean his hands were

She told me

That a hand can be cleaned

The way she made me

Clean mine

So you can’t tell anything

About a person from that

Except that they want to

Present something

To the world

‘But a voice,’ she said, ‘Those “t”s and “r”s…

Now they can tell you something’

I still think about that

When I wash my hands

And put on a suit

And go door-to-door

Asking people

If they want to hear the word

I think about what I present

And who I am

And how clean my hands look

And how clean they’ll never look

Because of the things

I can’t scrub off

I think about my ‘t’s and ‘r’s

And I rest my fingers

On the doorframe

Asking to be let in

To living rooms

And kitchens

And sacred spaces

Sometimes I see a cross

Hanging over the fireplace

And I know I’ve found my hearth

‘Sometimes dirty looks like clean

And sometimes good looks like bad’

That’s something

My mother used to tell us

‘Sometimes the devil talks like god’

And who the hell can tell

The difference