"Matches for toys!" beg the girls and the boys.

Forty lashes, forty nights
forty degrees outside
pouring through my bedroom window

and I can feel it now
like the pinpointed pressure
between the front part of my skull
and the spongy pink mass
of miswired electrical paths.
I know that this rod is the finger of God--
"Do it," I mock the Father
but I know that He won't
the coward that He is
as Creation, abandoned, shows us.
"They'd all be better off," comes the lie.
It's not so selfless, never is.
We were built in His flawed image.

The pressure builds to a definite climax
an undeniable presence in my senses
and subsides like a broken tide, a broken time.
My eyes open sideways on my shameful pillowcase
seeing nothing in the blackness of my room
and close again-- seeing nothing, knowing nothing
missing nothing.

They come and go, these threats and foreshadowings
of the Maker, of the Grand Puppeteer.
I fear none of them more than a moth
though when it finally burns me
I'm sure I'll scream like the rest, like the wretch.

You're promised nothing by your unfair birth--
not even a good death.