When I was younger,
Which is to say yesterday,
The Lord left my life without fanfare:
The omnipresent evaporated in an Irish goodbye.
With film-free eyes suddenly seeing for the first time,
My family, neighbors and strangers,
I was convinced I could save them all,
With the Truth instead of their truth.
My Exodus was solitary but certainly angled towards greener pastures,
Where the past could be rectified with the present,
In order to craft an authentic future,
And where the walls of tradition wouldn’t block the spotlight of inquest:
In short, an Eutopia.
No wonder my father struggled,
With the patience befitting a saint.
To find the vocabulary to bridge the gaps between the world I saw
And the kingdom he inhabited.
He never succeeded and I don’t think he can:
We’re different breeds born to different worlds,
With different words and Gods, heroes and villains.
We arrived at a metaphysical armistice,
After placating him by confessing by envy of his faith,
Which was only partially a lie,
But spoke loudly enough to his truth for resonance.
Today I am older and wiser,
Those two things being completely unrelated,
Mature enough to realize that God wasn’t the only casualty,
In my unregrettable revolt to replace God with Truth,
Evidenced by the broken body of certainty bleeding beneath me,
As I claimed victory over the oppression of indoctrination.
On nights when my soul is especially strained,
Ground down by the weight of time and monotony,
I have called out to my forsaken shepherd,
Pleading for a break – just a moment,
To taste from the chalice once more and taste the warmth of assurance,
That tomorrow was known at least by someone if not me.
“No matter”, Mutter Nacht mutters,
As she blankets my anxiety with the void,
Wiping away my tears and dreams alike,
Delivering me to a new tomorrow,
When I am wholly uncertain as to what happened the previous night,
As well as the following morning,
Which is where I’ll stay, precariously,
Until the end of the todays,
Looking in on those whose Truth has saved them,
While mine has damned me to the perpetuity I feared.