PART X: LET US KILL THE GOD OF OUR IMAGINATIONS
I continue--
Having nowhere to stay
One foot in this world
One foot in the next
And belonging in either
Oh One who is All--
Show unblocked way--
That I may faint and dream
Unimaginable aid
*
Wretched turns
Course the way
No accounting
The conditions
Why good goes bad
And bad goes worse
Wretched turns
Plot the course
*
You tell me why we fell--
You tell me why we were cast out--
Why our genuine effort's never
Penance or grace enough enough to heal and repair--
You tell me why God loves our pain
Why forgiveness is demanded that is
Not shown to us--for all the faith
In prayer--and why all amends are blocked
By divine imperatives for amends
You tell me all I cannot imagine
If I could imagine it
Or if you tell me about it
Then that isn't it at all--
Daily my soul is inspired to its trembling--
This supposed co-creator stumbling
In merest guess of his sorrow
*
You will be done down over and over
You will get the pegs knocked out from under you
Every foundation you lay will crumble
And nothing you build will stand
All you touch will slip through your fingers
No connections will lead anywhere anytime
You will have no choice but to move and every
Move will be the wrong one
Your arms loaded? Then know
Your burden will be increased
And--like a cartoon--the last floating
Feather landing on top of the pile
Will send you plummeting through the floor
Your heart is sorrowing? Then be assured
No amount of time will heal it
You are sorry? then don't expect prayer to chnage anything
Or Grace make a difference to your misery
You will have dreams you will never figure out
You will have their issue seeping out of your wounds
Who help us then? If this is God's Love
What must His Wrath be about?
*
My mind in sotto voce advices me--
Get wise sonny--
Your pretense of deep contrition
Is another evil the Lord
Can do without--
I'm no better in my alleged suffering holiness
Than others whose delusions of grandeur
Are their only visions of heaven--for what
But opportunity for error in prayer--
The emphasis inescapably on self?
My mind may advise as it will--
But will it eventually divest itself
Of its own cripplings of faith?
Will my mind learn acquiescence
To God who does everything
By doing nothing?
*
Let us kill the god of our imaginations!--
That petulant projection of our selfishness--
That thug we've created in our own filthy image--
That miscreant majesty we've invented to excuse ourselves
And to interfere with the lives of others--
Our invective righteous as advantageous safety
Let us kill this devious deity--
It is he at whom we aim self-hatred as blasphemy--
It is he we curse for our stubborn failings--
It is he we blame for our ills and whom we would
Manipulate to harm and to ruin our enemies
Who invoke like their image of God for protection and victory--
Let us destroy this notion of god destroying us--
Let us do away once and for all with this evil
Keeping our minds fogged by the narcotic of stupidity
Keeping our hearts enchained to craven habits
Keeping our souls enmeshed in our puerile creations
And separated from the True One whose works
Are wrought and ruined through us and whose sufferings
Consequently are ours--
Let us peer into the Void at last and see what
We are wrought-
Let us finish with this way that only blocks the Way--
Let us kill the god of our imaginations
That we may find
God--
*
My fatal lack of of perspective
Leads me astray--
Cold reasoning deciding
A bird's a god or the stone's manna--
An earthquake's an omen or
Health a carrier of delayed woes--
Bitterness unbounded by
The weakness of the will
And so confessed on an empty morning
Focused in some overriding view
Things become themselves again
And I gather myself up--
The chair the window the trees the sun
All lit with the blaze of matter
While I twist in a daze with nerves
Crackling like a sparking wire
*
God was watching the misery on earth
Weeping with His hands behind His back
Making not a move toward those in pain
Who were beseeching Him for His help and mercy
Because they were only receiving back
The harm they'd done to others--
"Trouble comes to all--but woe to the one who brings it"
And all this by God's own law--
It is said God does not contradict Himself (His wonderous
Paradoxes evidently a different matter)
And so He will do nothing but let them
Wallow--letting this way of self-atonement
Be His justice--
Until they become wise and strong enough
To break the effects of the laws of God
By obeying them so completely they themselves
Will Become The Law--and rejoin
God watching the misery on earth
*
Of course I wish it could all be
Honey and roses
The golden light
Saturating the multi-hued hills
And leaving shimmering stems
On the peaked waters
Even if my words--or any words--
Stunted truths in themselves--
Could never render the fullness
Of this reality--
But my fate is not such--
No amends are enough--
No punishments too severe
Or sustained to be
Mitigated or cancelled--
Forgiveness emphatically not the balm
We were taught it is--or if so--
Then on a scale beyond what we
Can measure or appreciate
This then is the Way--
His doing our price--
The reason honey leaves sticky residue
And red or pink or white roses
Wilt to universal brown--
The reason the leaden light
Drains and bares the blank hills
And levels the peaked waters--
Where my words--and no words--
Could ever render the reality
Of this emptiness
*
Left alone in the world--
Peace thickens like a fog--
A distant clamor
Underscores the dense silence--
Nothing under the ceiling of heaven
Moves but for my inner stirrings--
Cacophony mutely tumbling in the hush--
I am unable to transcend--
The Void fills with images
Squeezing free of the process of experience--
Memory recording the subjective brunt--
And flashing on the screen of nothingness
The sad parade of shame and waste and loss
That brought me to this terminus--
A jitter in the calm night air
[End of PART X.]
End of WAILS OF THE WRAECCA
(Note:'wraecca' is an Anglo-Saxon word for an outcast, an exile--a wanderer)
Content (c) 2008-2010 Philip Milito.
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