I’m mired in it,
Stuck down where the
Clean can’t reach me,
Because I am, by every
Definition of the Catholic Church,
A sinner, unrepentant as hell.
And yet. While I freely confess
Without regret the masturbation,
Homosexuality, heresy,
Apostasy, and missing mass;
Attracted polyamorously,
Proliferate in profanity,
I battle with the Big Seven daily.
It’s like anything else:
Everything in balance, a
Measure of functional imperfection.
Essentially: sadness is the sane response to tragedy,
Depression is a weight on the world.
Lust is a natural drive to reproduction,
Pleasure, intimacy,
But a terrible central tenet.
We crave nourishment,
Covet comfort,
Have built ourselves a social system
That spins on this
Philosophy of worthiness-in-possession,
And so some sins have greater penalties,
It seems to me,
Knee-deep in the fashion of each era.
An it harm not others, do what thou wilt
Say some, others:
Do What Thou Wilt shall be the whole of the law
Still more a complex set of instructions,
Proliferating sin into the central condition,
Saddling each newborn with a burden
Bereft of innocence.
How original.
I have a complex relationship with sin,
Preferring a general definition:
Deliberately diverting energy against what is healthy,
An excess of going your own way
Into what you know, at every level
Is self-evidently
Wrong.
Of course, Pratchett said that it begins
With treating people like things,
A man whose own rage,
Righteous and otherwise,
Strides pages and stages
And mazes of minds,
Winding tight around some aspects
And not others – fans frantic
At the pick’n’mix banquet of this
Fantastic philosophy.
That’s a side-bar, naturally,
And I’m not sure it matters;
Frankly, I’m having my own battles
With gravity and entropy,
The only flightpath I can see
Being through the dark door
I’ve had the keys for since
Before I was born.
It’s the fifth one
(according to Wikipedia)
Which is giving me these
Congenital difficulties.
When does determined tip into
Stubborn?
Where does passionate advocacy
Snap into anger?
How does a howl of righteous
Ire get mired in the offence of wrath?
Because I’m tarred and feathered,
This sin’s heft in every expression
Because when patience failed,
Rage got me through,
Hoist my arse and told me what to do,
Because I knew already, and all I needed
Was one final straw for kindling,
Kindness and self-effacement dwindling
When considering
That someone else’s sinning
Had me treated like a thing.
And that’s all well and good,
Or would be if it could discern when
What looks like injustice
Is just chaos
When, instead of wielding a mace
And wading in it should pace itself,
Drip-feed fuel to a banked fire
Driving the underlying hum of:
Come on, you’ve got this
(instead of torching the place
and staying to make faces
at those attempting to flee).
I’ve long since decided that
The world can be divided into
Two groups:
Those who nodded when Banner said:
“That’s the secret – I’m always angry,”
And those who shook their heads.
If rage is built into your DNA
It’s hard to know what to say to
Those who maintain:
Just chill, as if it were so easy,
Who’ll never know how much better
Fire is than freezing.
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| Image source: Dies Irae (Day of Wrath) by Vera Klimova via Artmajeur |
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