Confession: a personal inventory

It’s been twelve years
since my last confession.
Sitting soft-dicked
naked at night,
straining to say
something, I
pick brittle toenails –
disgusting I can be.
There once was a man from Nantucket. . .

My heart extends
to whole generations:
unwelcomed pity,
undesired empathy.
Narod, I am undesirable,
so I shelter behind
philosophical inquiry:
how can I marry
endurance and change
without making one
master the other?
How can I berate
the kosmos
and leave untouched
the God who is?
The undesirable is
our only hope.
Whose dick was so long he could suck it. . .

Approval is arbitrary;
praise depends on
the paschal mark –
the scared away goat
carries with it
all detested things.
Any shibboleth will do
so long as it separates
sheep from goats.
Do sheep feel
what goats feel?
And what non-god
can do the sorting?

He said with a grin as he wiped off his chin,
“If my ear was a cunt I would fuck it.”

I need not actually
have the mark;
the undesirable
may be imputed to me –
baptized into the cross,
the albatross, guilt.

I have guilt
enough
my own;
having no guilt,
I would still stand
condemned to meaning
and absence.

I wish sometimes
you knew;
I wish sometimes
you could hear:

You are not
what you make;
mortality remains
unthreatened by
brilliance;
fire betrays
desperation;
God-envy is
pointless and
no kin to
greatness.

Do not fear
my little love–
not loneliness,
not unattractiveness,
not even death.