The Hypocritic Oath

there is no need for castigation

in the halls of your cognition

there is no need to infuse each heartbeat

with heartache and derision

there is no need to announce your failures 

and synchronize your terrors

and anticipate the coming of tomorrow

with today’s begotten sorrow

i have forgotten often times

just what it really means

to say yes and to say no and 

to deliberate the in betweens

to act forth without presumption 

of my own inadequate reaches

and the toiling and the striving

even as my heart beseeches

and tells me, my child, 

i have gotten too heavy

for you to keep ignoring

the things I have to carry

and we are not old and not young

but the path is strangely paved

and the wind is strangely cold

and the sins strangely depraved

there is a desert in this heart

where an ocean used to be

a dozen storms in the sky

a hundred verses off their key

and the war does not stop

and the skirmishes barely settle

and the sword in your hands

would sooner find another rebel

than to keep trying to defend

what is barely left upright

for the kingdom that is divided

will not win in a fair fight

But somehow this too, shall pass

like all terrors from beyond:

this is what we know about life

like a show, it must go on.

• July 2020, the year we do not want to remember