What is this face
So sacred to us
That we must save?
How bitter and strange it is
To maintain face
To avoid the stinging wind
Upon naked skin.
Lo the awful Gospel
Of God's piercing gaze!
To know no soul stays hidden
And all shall be revealed,
But we mask ourselves
And stand our ground,
Afraid,
Maintaining image and place
In society fake
And family estranged,
Fighting a sea of shame
By keeping truth at bay.
How much then can a father
Say to a son, or
A son to his old man,
Trapped between the boundary lines
Of strict familial metrics,
Where truth and triumph
Lay buried beneath
The impervious weight
Of silvery second place?
Here, the deceitful easy harmony
Of moments reigns supreme.
What are these laws of fear
That bind us?
Who made them ours
To uphold?
Who plagued us
With such angry allegiance?
You curse me with courtesy
And honorable greetings,
The lauded fraud
Of the family,
In all the sickened talk
So unfathomably small,
And all this whilst
Our children crumble;
All this whilst
You sleep in separate beds.
When will a hero come
To say merely what is real,
To speaks words
That match their meanings
In tones that tell the truth?
Liberated to feel,
Free to wage
In open fields
The wars of life,
Together or apart,
In grasses green
Or deadened brown:
Heroics here
Means the liberty to be,
Taking the exodus path
Across a dead and salty sea,
To pass through
Fury and gray,
Burying self and honor
And face,
Made exposed, thirsty,
And pitifully poor;
Salvation is taking
The miraculous, disastrous
Passage from self-safekeeping
To a place of jettison
Utterly unsafe,
Much like laying naked
In a desert,
Begging for rain and shade,
And then,
When each day,
A few sips fall,
Made to wait,
Until the desert fire
Turns each day's darkness
Into an only friend,
Till exposure sets in
And defenseless, you see
Your silty skin
Begin to whither in return,
And with a wondrous flash
A glimpse is given:
All is fleeting,
But the broken.
And then to cry,
The shame:
"Woe is me!
Who am I
Save for grace?"
Yes, the sea of a man's salvation
Leads through a scorching desert,
meekness in the making.
Yes, indeed it burns
Outside these rules.
Our bitter dinner table conventions
Call for grave escape.
The rebellion will be punished,
But we'll become true
And ever truer.
Life and death
Is the difference made
Between saving oneself
And saving face,
Lo alone the meek are saved.