Mutiny

She said poetry was a crime

against the sullen self we share, 

that single soul we take turns renting

from eternity and oblivion, the leasehold voice,

the ghost of love our borrowed hearts inhale

with every beat, abandon with the next, 

the lie we must believe, the heretic faith

that fends off indifference or despair, 

but the poem is a wound that bleeds shadow, 

screams silence at the end of empty speech, 

a prophecy and a curse that annihilates 

and transforms what can't be spoken

into words that heal strangers defeated

by generations of secrecy and deception.

We bind the limp forearm, mangled with excuses, 

and stitch it shut with the medicine of myth. 

We launch ourselves upon epics of sin,

seeking blessed isles of lost innocence

promised us by gods long since departed.

Our world is an ocean of divine amnesia.

The creator forgot us not long after 

the idle whim of our creation. 

Our search for meaning is an end in itself.

We aim a broken sextant at a false meridian,

hallucinate a course across unreliable charts,

and enthusiastically congratulate ourselves

on the great achievement we call navigation

through the infinite absence of God,

lords of lack in that desert of desecration 

our prows probe with conquistador curiosity.

Our position may be correct by accident.

There's always that possibility.  

Science improves our chances, 

but we will never know the exact odds, 

just the increment by which they shift

as we drift in their variable favour. 

We wouldn't know if we were right anyway,

even if we were, because we are lost, 

and that is the essence of being lost.  

So when the command comes, remember

it has all the authority of the thin air

into which our certainty has vanished.

What can we be sure of? Each other, 

after all the ignorance and betrayal

we practise on each other every day?

Ourselves, crippled by anxiety and resentment,

thwarted entitlement, petty grievance, 

abject terror before the monolith of others?

No, our mutiny, our poem, is a rebellion

against the self we inherit, the insect self

that infects and infiltrates the ant hill brain,

the self we're sold that buys nice clothes,

takes pride in tribe, finds salience in similarity, 

and fantasises about wealth and power. 

Our mutiny reinstates the presence of God. 

It consecrates every gutter. It sinks 

the origami boat of pretension and law

Our rebellion is against the fraudulent self,

and connects us to others in whom we seek the self

that we will recognise in the wilderness, the humility

that grapples us to the presence of God.