It was someday after Saturday
when we would rise and gather
with pressed dress
to make the drive to the mega
mall-church out in the dry hills
among the dilapidated dwellings
that spread out towards the east.
Someday; I would dream
doodling on benches and
pews as the droning cadence
swelled and fell with the
regular tempo of admonishing
and adorating devotion.
Somedays' signalled the
silent commandments of
sit; stand; sing; sit; stand; shake
sit; listen; stand; sing; leave
that narrated with metronomic
regularity the arch of my
sacrilegious boredom.
Someday, at 16, I drove
seperate and never arrived.
Playing hookie with god
became my first act of
creation; I began, reborn
on the day he rested and
I discovered the truth of
my greatest nagging fear:
in all the dark nights of
prayer and reading and
worship, the silence I
heard was not the
distance of my own
original sin echoing back,
but the freedom of
total nothingness
waiting
for me to hear its call.
Someday, I anwsered.
And ran away and towards
the nothingness that had
hid behind the wizards curtain
and ripping that strange and
foreign cloth, embroidered
with guilt and shame and
fear in the color of blood
and called true love and
turned it into a cape that
I wore and defiled and
desecrated with all the
pride that wearing a cape
in public, in school, at home,
brings.
Someday, the cloth may
fade and grow bare, as
will I.
Someday. But not today.
