The Advice I Wish They'd Given Me at Graduation, pt. 3

Love is an iron manacle

Forged in the heat of passion.

It binds us to our mistakes,

To unhealthy relationships.

Love is the only reason that I

Have ever spent contiguous hours of time

With someone who makes my nails reach for my eyes,

But over the years, in all of the seasons,

There've been people I liked for explicable reasons.

Spending time with them is something I choose

Despite freedom, despite other things I could do.

God likes me. God likes you.

Crisis of Belief

The blunt end of Revelation grows in heaven, from a seed.

Its branches underlie us, too monumental to be seen

By the legions, billions, ignorant—a number once including me.

Until one day, down the middle, my skull was rudely pierced

By a sculptor's knife, an existential ax-blade—a mere leaf.

As ignorant as I'd been, I swore ne'er again I'd be,

But had I known the fight I'd have to make the world believe

Or even just acknowledge, to this task would I've agreed?

I lived before I knew. That knowing now comes naturally.

Knowing what I know, can I go back, forget, retreat?

It's too tiring to believe in the Truth, the kind with a capital T.

Springtime in Anywhere

Spring is freedom if you hate school. To me, it's being left

Socially and spiritually, intellectually bereft.

Though it's not a social matter, nor the people I miss most.

It's not surrounded (in Church or otherwise) that I've known the Holy Ghost.

I'm simply an animal that requires inspiration –

Intellectual stimulation–to long continue respiration.

At a time when excitement and nostalgia are in order

I come down with a reverse seasonal affective disorder.

If I'm not being creative, or at least academic,

Then I start getting depressive, or even just plain sick.

If I'm not writing or teaching with my life, then what am I doing?

I hate spring.

To an Ingenue with Nowhere to Go

It seems you can't go home again

For the risk of slipping on your solitude

and becoming mired in muddied memories.

It seems you can't go home again

While the sky cackles in triumph at your loss,

Raining in sheets to mock your mere drops,

Saying, “even your tears are nothing

To the rest of the world,” which has it all.

It only seems you can't go home again,

For Zeus profits nothing by your losses;

You were made in God's image, not Jupiter's.

You will breathe and live and love

Long after the thunderhead's cloudy countenance

Is a skull stained by rainbows, bleached white by sun.

God has the rest of the world, and has it all–

Even your back–

So go back.

Home is where the heart was,

and can find its way to be again.