Please, Settle Down

I'm asking you, settle down, stop your knocking against this rib cage, in the dark, in captivity. Start wanting sleepy, early sunrises, and partings that aren't the last — only the latest so far. Sunsets — when the sun lies down to sleep in the field… Knock, shout, but now without the tormenting pain… Without the midnight hysterics, loud, unprintable. Why patch it all up afterward with drunken sex? Throwing the gnawed bones of words into a notebook. No need for light, for air, not even those forgotten dreams… A free fall, all the way down to a solid crash into acceptance. Then apathy… still can't get it down off that cross after all these years… Will and Freedom, twin sisters, poor things, asking to come in, knocking year after year… Loitering at the windows — hoping Hope will notice them. She alone, through the bitter frosts, is the only clothing that saves you — blind, frozen, foolish — today, the way she's saved you more than once before, not from someone else, but from your own terrifying self. There's no one dearer to you than her. Everything will come — the long-awaited joy of triumph. But who needs that pointless bravado, anyway? The fake pretense of a do-gooder. Lying to yourself in heaps, without so much as a blush, scattering pearls before some pink, fuzzy little snout, pushing your way in wherever, soap in hand. Even imported soap, even sweet-smelling — walking into your house, God will still gasp and hurry straight back out the way he came. The Mother on the icon will weep blood. And you won't buy your way out with tears and pleading — only with work, with labor, shoulder to shoulder with people, out in the daylight, until the day you finally wake up able to observe the Oneness in everyone, able to sort the meat from the flies swarming it, able to feel the free, eternal spirit, and sing of it through the hard working days, not fearing the arrival of judgment. And more guilty, perhaps, is the one who never once, in all Eternity, let Humanity out of its cage…