A Place of Forgiveness

Must I be clever, caked in mud, cold. It is degrading. The things I feel when I lie to sleep. You'd never know. Not you whose clothes are clean. It is easier to run in clean clothes. So do not think yourself clever. Knowing there is nothing worth saying, knowing the mud is the attrition of us all, all our last stand, softening our fall. So keep being clever, but in the place of the things you say, think about all those blank goddamn bible pages. Think about those pages, buried in dead seas as dead as scriptures of forever and ever, just think about all those dogeared hymnals screamed with the deepest hate for fathers who did not cause all the fuckin cancers and pain and the time we all need so so much more of, though nor could they prevent it. They stand a brittle wall divorced from sin and weak of flesh, and we hate them and we tell them we hate them, because we are too brittle and weak from the chemo to tell the Father of all our fathers to fuck off, though we want to and we are bitter with words in our gut like bile. We get off on fantasies of ourselves in some dirty desert town sucking to the butt and letting smoke trickle from our lips, our eyes never leaving His. Hairless as we came. Riding nausea, a mustang taking us God knows where through the dry brush. Mud under our fingernails. Everything we touch stained this way. Wanting reconciliation but first revenge. Blood of our Father, our own blood, a fine mess it is. Morning comes with drowned and bloated bodies floating downriver, who know there is nothing worth saying, washing up on muddy banks under the rainbow. From some storybook without words. And here, on the shores of dead seas, wearing mud on our clothes and under our nails, nothing to say, we can forgive.