Nobody expects the Son of God to oversleep. Yet the poem opens with exactly that: "Jesus got up one day a little later than usual." The phrase "one day" sounds like the start of a parable or fairy tale, but "a little later than usual" drags it down into the world of alarm clocks and unmade beds. Within a single sentence, the figure of the Gospels becomes someone with a morning routine.
The poem is built as a small block of prose, six lines long, with no rhyme and no regular meter. The line breaks seem to follow the width of the page rather than the sense. Words are split across lines ("dream-/ing," "beau-/tiful"), which is something a poet shaping a line for effect would avoid. The rhythm comes from speech instead. Sentences are short and often fragments: "A nightmare, dead bodies walking all around him, eyes rolled back, skin falling off." The questions are casual too: "What was it?" "How 'bout some coffee?" The contractions and the slangy "How 'bout" make the whole thing sound like someone talking, or thinking aloud.
That voice shifts as the poem goes on. It begins in the third person, with a narrator reporting what Jesus did. By "Don't mind if I do," the narrator has stepped aside and Jesus is answering his own question, like a man alone in his kitchen. By "my donkey" we are fully inside his head. The effect is intimate and a little comic. We aren't watching a holy figure from a distance. We are overhearing him.
The imagery is where the poem turns strange. The dream is described as so deep that "there was nothing left in his head," and then the next sentence produces a vivid horror: walking corpses, rolled-back eyes, skin sloughing off. It's a zombie film, packed into one line. A reader who knows the Gospel story of Lazarus being called back from the dead may hear an uneasy echo, since raising the dead is part of this figure's legend. The poem doesn't push that connection, and I'd call it an inference rather than a statement. What the text does say is that Jesus "wasn't afraid of that." Then comes the flat pivot: "It was a beautiful day." The dead are dismissed in four words and the sun comes out.
The rest of the poem is a list of small pleasures: coffee, a ride, a favourite animal. The donkey is a sly choice. Jesus riding a donkey is a famous image from the Gospels, tied to a solemn entry into a city. Here it's just a "little ride" for fun, and the affection is almost childlike: "I love that donkey." The last line widens that affection to the whole world, and the word "Hell" works hard in it. It reads as a mild, breezy exclamation. But it also names the place of damnation, dropped casually into the mouth of the one who might be expected to rescue people from it. The line is warm and slightly dangerous at once.
That double effect is the poem's central tension. The title, "Goodtime Jesus," sounds like a nickname for a cheerful drinking companion. It invites us to read the poem as a joyful humanising of the sacred, in which love is simple and fear has no hold. Yet the nightmare sits right in the middle of the poem and is never explained. Is Jesus's calm a kind of serenity, a love big enough to look at death and walk past it? Or is it a shrug, a refusal to dwell on suffering because the coffee is hot and the sky is clear? The poem leaves both readings open. "Hell, I love everybody" can be the most generous sentence in it or the most glib.
That ambiguity is why the poem is worth reading. In six lines it takes the most solemn figure in Western culture, gives him a lie-in, a bad dream and a cup of coffee, and then asks whether goodness is something you can feel before breakfast, or something that has to look at the horror first.