         A talking blues track born of idiocy versus strength.
 Some days you have a song before you finish your coffee. Today, I picked up the paper, and there was the president sharing a meme of himself as Jesus Christ.
Not the suffering Christ. Not the cross. The healing Christ—robes on, hand pressed to a sick man’s forehead, light shooting out of his palm. Eagles overhead. Fighter jets. Fireworks over the Statue of Liberty. Soldiers ascending into heaven behind him. Painted like a Thomas Kinkade fever dream. Posted from his phone on a Sunday morning.
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When pressed by a reporter, Trumple-Thin-Skin said it wasn’t Jesus—called it a doctor, pointed to the Red Cross. But the robes stayed. The light poured. The hand pressed to a forehead, straight out of two thousand years of paintings. He named it one thing; the image declared another—and it wasn’t medicine.
Then the cognitive assessment test showed up. Two pictures. A doctor on the left. Jesus on the right. One question: identify the doctor.
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That same Sunday, the pope told him to stand down on Iran.
One man tends the tomb. The other counts the bricks.
Rome, After Francis
Francis went into the ground on Easter Monday. He walked prison halls, washed inmates’ feet on Holy Thursday, slept in a guesthouse because he said the palace would break him.
White smoke went up over Rome last May. When it thinned, a man from Chicago stepped into the chair: Robert Francis Prevost. He took the name Leo XIV.
Trump called him weak on crime.
Leo didn’t call a press conference. He didn’t send anybody out to manage it. He just held.
How the Song Arrived
I’d already written the song.
One guitar. No production. Talking blues—words riding a simple strum, every syllable up front. I put two men in the same room and stepped back.
Not to resolve anything. Not to soften it. Just to let the contrast do its work.
The Dope Versus the Pope
Talking blues, 68 BPM — single acoustic guitar
He put his name on Bibles, sixty dollars, good as gold
Sunday morning, fingers moving, called the holy man cold
White smoke barely lifted when he sharpened up his pen
Ash falls quiet in the aisle—and he’s typing “amen”
The dope versus the pope
One of them sells the rope
The other walks the prison halls
And hands them back their hope
The dope versus the pope
God was in the room
One man counts his golden bricks
The other tends the tomb
Posted just past Sunday noon—a crown of thorns behind his head
He dressed up like a doctor—says he heals the nearly dead
Two thousand years of feeding poor, choosing what is right
One phone, one thumb, one Sunday—measured out to fight
The dope versus the pope
One of them sells the rope
The other walks the prison halls
And hands them back their hope
The dope versus the pope
God was in the room
One man counts his golden bricks
The other tends the tomb
The dope versus the pope
The cross or the crown
One man bleeds for what he holds
One lets the whole thing drown
Coda
One man tends the tomb. The other counts the bricks.
The Dope Versus the Pope is on Suno now. Everything else lives at genescottbooks.com.
