SELECTED SECTIONS FROM CONFESSIONS

Of course these confessions are edited.
You wouldn’t be reading them if they weren’t.
Edited, polished, proofed –
in a word, buffed
like the rounded fender
of a classic model T
until, reflected in its black sheen,
you begin to see
me.

But I confess
mostly I hate confessions –
all ego and self and passion
around a single pebble
on miles of ocean shore
as if the sun, stars, even galaxies
revolved on axes
around our speck of a world.

If you, dear reader, were the ear
of God, and I a believer,
eagerly would I pour all
out to you, and include,
in a paroxysm of catharsis,
every jot and tittle
down to the rawest detail.
But you’re not; moreover,
my amour propre,
my – can I say it any other way? –
my image of my sacred self
tries to shut my eyes
to exactly what I need to confess:
not masses of fact,
streams of revelations
or titillating peccadillos,
but particular lies.
_______

I do confess, I found
twixt waist and wig
– but omitting the heart –
much intriguing
in the body corporate.
Under the camouflage
of a beige blouse
or a red tie, behind smiles
poised as a missile shield,
lay the elemental human
animal and soul,
bullying and bullied,
magnanimous or stingy in strength,
vicious or craven in weakness,
self-centered as an amoeba
and as me.

It was a game played on a surface
smooth, flat and green
like a ping pong table,
Three feet above the floor.
We organized and re-organized
and re-organized again,
always above the bottom line,
and never looked lower.
_______

Evenings and weekends
I let escape
the poetry I kept secret
in the dark of my heart.

I wrote and wrote,
and the harder I worked by day
above the bottom line
the further by night
I sank below it.
_______

I had always thought confession,
like the sins you admit,
was something you did in the dark,
in secret, whispered
to a man in black, mostly invisible
and a stand-in for the real Confessor.

Struggling to find God
above, I found only sky,
blue, gray, blue-black with thunder.
Struggling to find Him
in myself, I found only a self,
fragile, fearful, doubting.

In church basements I found people
in brightly lit rooms, completely visible.
People who were not stand-ins,
but only themselves. People
looked others in the eye as they spoke
from the bottom of their throats.

Listening to them,
I could imagine
in their stories from hell
I was hearing the voice of the divine.

While admitting I was an alcoholic –
me, my sacred self striving to be free,
me an addict, one of them –
was the hardest confession I ever made,
now, each day, it was the first and simplest
(“My name is…and I am …”).
I confessed less my sins
than my secrets, less
my own loss than my lies,
less my pain than the pain I inflicted,
and I found in my fears
I had company,
in fallibility, friends.

A miracle had indeed happened:
although my ego was still filled with air,
my body no less paunchy,
and my reflexes below average,
I had been “re-born.”
But I was not saved.

Granted only a new beginning,
I had, like an infant,
a lifetime ahead of me.
A lifetime to become the me
I wanted to be.