Song of the Reluctant Nihilist

[heslopian]

I might have been a thousand souls,
more and less in touch with God,
treading the canyons of good and despair.
How simple and how beautiful existence would appear
in the light of moral clarity,
knowing if pain or empathy your heart beats to evoke.
I am lost in the woods of the human spirit.

I would have liked to inhabit the bones
of a God-fearing woman, hermetic and chaste,
tending her roses and reading her psalms,
her vaginal leaves dying in synch
with those which fill the golden urns
guarding Yahweh's door.

I could have lived with wickedness,
the dirges of hurt, the marches of hate
elicited from metal harps
inside my godless hands.
A swamp in the place of my soul,
yielding naught but skeletons.

Instead I linger here with you,
my anonymous priest,
sculpting my flesh into verse.
I try to seed the barren sky,
and speak with He who isn't there.