Imagine How Much Like a Man’s Shaved Armpit Allah Would be without Mohammad
No matter who the god is, he needs men
To help. He needs the prophets to deploy
Their fiery beards and bristle-tongued quill pen
Before he can proceed to pushing pain as joy,
Vituperation, encoded advice,
Or condemnation from mystic teeth.
He also uses women to entice
Us. Gods smile strangely but then underneath
Their pleasant messages, throne coaxings, threats,
And poetry, the priestesses and priests
And Sybils leave us stewing in our sweats
While gods and seers gobble down their feasts
Of nectar and ambrosia, fat of rams,
Of babies fried on Baal—and slit-throat lambs.
Ok, so in lines 2 and 3 you start out talking about prophets (plural) with “Their fiery bears” (plural), but then it is a singular “pen” because you want it to rhyme directly with “men,” so why don’t you just make the whole prophets thing singular, maybe?
“To help. He needs a prophet to deploy
His fiery beard and bristle-tongued quill pen” . . .
Then that runs into an Alexandrine for line four, for some reason, with its 12 syllables instead of 10:
“Before he can proceed to pushing pain as joy,” which reads ok, but why the extra long line when you could easily say something instead like
“Before proceeding to push pain as joy,” or
“Before he can start pushing pain as joy,” or something like that?
But a bigger hurdle which interrupts the meter is line six, with only nine syllables, and which would want us to put stress awkwardly on “from”:
“Or condemnation from mystic teeth.” So it seems you want a strong word/syllable to carry the stress in that sixth syllable position there before “from,” which would then fix the line by giving it a tenth syllable:
“Or condemnation spat through [mystic/mythic] teeth.” [one thinks of “false” teeth or perhaps a synonym for those instead of “mystic”?! or of through “clenched” teeth, as in anger??
Line 12 also is missing a beat:
“While gods and seers gobble down their feasts”
maybe replace “seers” there with something like “prophets” or “vicars” or . . . what? OH! Unless you were pronouncing “seers” as having two syllables, like “see-ers?” I’ve never heard it that way, though . . .
Or, line 12:
“While gods and seers {sit/lie/?} gobbling down rich feasts” . . .