Had you known full circumstance,
you might have been proud of me.
In the thin gap between deep chasm
of your pity and valley of wide wrath,
would you have looked for one second
to see me surrendered fully
to where this hellish life
had led me?

For who could dispute that today
I have done the honorable thing,
said the right thing, laid my life
down for a friend and pronounced
that there will be love
because it is the
only way
to live?

Survival depends upon it,
a lie washed clean with

heaven’s grace.

The courthouse judge
should’ve been an actor.
Everyone laughed but me –
strangers waiting, finding it funny:
a man who drops his cane, a woman
with tears and the inevitable pain, two exes
and an “o” for all they don’t know.
Everyone laughed but me.

I am only crying now,
trying to make sense of how it is
that we drift in darkness until
stars collide and the one rises
higher and burns brighter even as
the other flames out, implodes
and becomes a vast hole –

As if the cold universe
had been right along
when it said,

“There is no light in you.”

Long ago you chose
not to remember. Far away
you banished thing you said
never existed at all.
 
It was not enough
that you denied the beauty
of my flame. It was not enough
that you cast me out, deemed me
unfit for work and worship. It was
not enough that you took from me
all light and hope and did it
in the name of what is right.

Force of emptiness rakes through,
an invisible fine-toothed scythe.
I no longer feel the steely pain.
But it would not be hell
if I did not remember
love. And you.