The Laying on of Hands – Jesse Hilson

May 15, 2026

When the faith healer asked me where it hurt,
of course I said “my mind”
because then I wouldn’t need to demonstrate
a better condition afterward,
like the man next to my father who said “his shoulder.”
The Korean pastor made that sore man flex
after the healing.
He wanted him to fall back in astonishment.

Better to be like “I’m crazy, I have soul rot,”
and risk having the healer scorch his hands
on my evil.
I feared him touching me and recoiling
as if shocked. I feared it
yet in some hidden precinct deep within,
I was thrilled at expecting such a reaction.
It would confirm so much.
Instead, he gripped my skull
and asked me in Korean (translated)
to repeat “Jesus Christ is my master,”
and “I am convinced that Jesus listens
to my prayers.”
No reversal, no ritornello for you,
reader-predator, to feed on,
who wants an irony or an ambiguity
to fill in the last few lines
which haven’t been written yet.

I will walk across the Chinvat Bridge
made of a string of my father’s catheters.

It’s wrong to imagine Jesus Christ
as a worried boss in a call center,
with a baseball bat to slam down
on telemarketer’s desks if they don’t make quota,
but that’s how some zealots make it seem.
They want to stick it in your craw,
in your imaginary
(adjective as a noun, as scholars say it).

Next day, on my way to work, I needed gas
($4.29 a gallon)
and couldn’t get into the tight gas station
because Mormon kids were in the way, 
weaving in and out of the pumps in their SUV, 
asking people if they wanted to join their church. 
Remember how the missionaries made me cry?
In my house, alone, lonely sad, made me recite
Joseph Smith’s scripture and I burst into tears:
Hey God, you’re very forceful sometimes.
I do notice your hidden faces in my way.
I know I’m yours in the end and I’ll listen,
but damnation, I’m already crazy enough:
I don’t want to hear your hymns 
come through on the radio in random signals
(“Hell” by Squirrel Nut Zippers came on
as I drove away from the Mormons
with my full tank of gas: subtle).

Is it a message, or just a propensity,
a habit of reading tea leaves all around me?
The word-pareidolia in a T-shirt slogan,
text in waking hours, Your face-matrices
that beg to be seen—
before it’s too late. I know you’re coming for me.
I know I’m a fool that hopes one day
to put on Parsifal’s greaves
and do spiritual warfare for God 
against evil in books and art hung up in galleries.
Still a squire though. God’s squire.
Jesus Christ’s peewee wrestler,
barely with pubes at age 50.
“Preach, and if you must, use words.”

I pray to God, for attainable things,
so that when they come to pass,
it’s not like playing a game with a child,
going easy on Him to trick Him into winning—
more that I accurately scoped 
God’s justice and mercy at work
in my small-scale life:
His benevolence snapped into place in my life 
like the major components of a plastic model set
broken free of their sprue on Christmas morning.