Faith
Don’t tell me I need faith.
The faith you preach
Forces all my uncertainties
Into a dark basement corner
Blocking the door
With assured expectations guaranteed
In stacks of yellowing Watchtowers
Your faith stings
Like the delayed fizzle of a love-bomb
That popped and crackled
With welcoming eyes and
Glad-you’re-here pats on the back
But when the fuse was spent,
I felt only the dry shrapnel
Of the same refrain repeated
Five times a week for twenty-seven years:
Do more, do more, do more.
I lived with the hooks of fear
That Paradise might forsake me if I failed
To ring doorbells and distribute magazines,
Or if some doubt should slither in my mind
Searching for purchase in sterilized soil.
Your faith smells of the sickly sweet rot
Of a mother who tells her son
She’d have preferred his adultery
Because she can’t forgive his questions—
Of a daughter who holds unseen baby smiles
Hostage to a grandmother’s conformity.
Your faith tastes of a life spent
Trying to satisfy a hobbled mind
With stale hoagies and flat soda pop—
Like the sour red Kool-Aid I drank
To flood a tongue parched with ‘No’
To a doctor’s plea for blood
In the collapsing veins of a dying child.
I can’t return to a faith
That lives on dutiful ‘amens’
To all the prayers I never wanted to say,
Pleas for cleansing the earth
At the hands of a God whose only miracle
Is turning the sea of humanity
Into a river of death,
Horse-head deep in gore—
A fitting foundation for a Paradise
Whose entry fee is unquestioning obedience.