there’s a Miller on the table
muffled yells from our neighbor
I took one look into my conscience
found my scruples enabled
I drive by the strip club down the street
where all the liberated boys go to seek
their mother covered in a
childish dream
Faith like a simple child
doesn’t feed on the weak
there’s no masculinity
in lust or greed
—
when I was a child
I used to talk as a child,
and think in terms of
Lone Identity
Now I read O’Connor’s stories
that haunt me in my sleep
maybe salvation
is not what i first believed
—
well the truth now is I wanna kid
but I don’t think I can afford it
you see I can barely take good care of myself
I hear a voice that keeps on screaming
you’re just a con artist with a canvas
why don’t you sell out
and make a decent living?
—
I’m tired of these empty promises
of Renaissance dreams
stiff Victorian moralism,
courts of impassioned romantics,
I’m left a voyeur of man,
an abstract
not a creature
who thrives between extremes
—
I place my hopes in material pleasure
But wind up chained,
cold in fetters
Chasing a fallacy,
an attraction to form
I could have just as easily said pornography
Or narcotics
Or ambition
as an architect
any number of finite fashioned gods
And worship
at the altar of emotion
that goes with
An existential notion
That what I see
Is all there is to be
—
God I don’t want to be a fraud
I just want conviction of cause
Which often looks like
a faint outline of My Cross
It’s only harrowing Grace
That convinces me to take
Yves’s leap out of faith
not out of resignation
to a great unknown,
surrender all
the preconceived notions
of faith
—
Oh, the void that lays before me
Is spun to mythic proportions
and galaxies
In the mind of the skeptic,
the modern man
No I don’t trust his machines,
Nor post-modern critiques,
I seek a Person who lives
And dies like me []
