"There Are No Atheists In A Foxhole"

"Boy," she said from the doorway,
"only you can have a late-night
drunken rendezvous that ends
an hour later
with the girl leaving in tears."
I wasn't sure whether to take it
as a compliment
or a cut-down.

"No, it wasn't like that.
She's a friend,"
and the words sounded strange
coming out of my mouth.
Sometimes the lines blur on me
after the double-vision sets in
as the rounds
and the funds
and the good judgment
go down.

The sick cycle of hurt people hurting people
and the Superman Complex
failing again;
"He can't even help himself,
how can he save someone else?"

Woke up alone next to Miss Mossberg, 20,
and noticed that I'd missed the bottle a little
and the point entirely:

Loneliness is the water-torture penance
that must be paid for my last five years,
and this forked tongue in sheep's clothing
can't talk its way out of it.

But we're all guilty:
we've all trampled those
tulips
long ago
with our respective
two
lips
and worse
have become the very things
that we stubbornly claim made us
the ways we are
in the process.

Lord, give us strength
to deal with those
whose fears never dealt with them.

"Boy..." she said from across the hall,
and it didn't matter
how I took it anymore.







Currently reading:
"The Red Pony" by John Steinbeck.
"My Side Of The Mountain" by Jean Craighead George.