POPEHOUND

The past is an abstract and wonderful thing. It has already happened. You can agonise over what cannot be changed, mourn what cannot be replicated or repaired. You can delight in what cannot be touched, or marred, by the passage of time, protected by the absolute. I have conflicted feelings about my own past. Much of it I do not remember, and the parts I can pluck from the stream of memory are often not pleasant. I spent years drowning in those rapids, unable to claw my way to land. The neural pathways I had forged were tangled, broken, and in desperate need of fixing. As an adult now, I believe that some of my difficulty remembering even the years I was drowning, stems from the fact that I was never in the present. I am a memory stuck inside a memory. A labyrinth formed. Much of my job in the process we call healing, was to shatter those paths. To drain the sea. The task feels impossible, and even as I commit myself to its journey, I often feel the desire to just let my battered brain be. However, when I observe others, especially those close to me, enveloped in an event that has already been lost to time, recreating it in the present as though it is still occurring, I often feel encouraged to remain true to this.

It is one thing to be engaged in turmoil over your own past. Your mistakes and grievances, the horrible what-ifs that pondering often grants, are your own to sink or swim in. To consider the surface from the shore. To force another person to relive the past you have constructed, to form a cycle out of memories built from memories, is its own creature to examine. In this case, I am not talking about accountability, nor the appropriate way to correct someone on past actions, but rather to use someone else’s past that is no longer relevant, written from your point of view, as a weapon to plunge into their backs. Such an action is a kind of hurt that is as sharp as a thorn. A double-edged sword. Those who live by the sword, die by the sword. I am often reminded of this verse when I choose the way in which to live. When I consider another’s past, actions, their mistakes, their victories, their experiences. I decide that if I am willing to plunge such things into their sides, I must be willing to experience in turn. To remove the log from my own eye before pointing out the stick in someone else’s. What is the relevance of my recreating the event? Reliving it? Is it true to my memory, or have I twisted it to be cruel? Is the mere mentioning of this experience a person has gone through simply a dagger I have forged with venom from my tongue? These questions I ask myself, yet I find others do not.

You fall to your knees, my filth a shadow to your sanctity Gasping my name, spattering your scent like sea salt So that at night, alone, I mouth at my pillow And I tear at my sheet like your scriptures You come to me in dreams with your back turned I know you by the muscles I have traced The skin I have studied to devotion You tell me to turn this love to faith But a man only sees Heaven once

I caress the cruelty in the shape of your brow Raise of your hand shielded by my bind on your wrist I suckle at the space between us Because my desire is desperate So bless me with hatred, your tongue that cuts like tragedy I lick up your mess until my gums are silver from your blade Greedy and sinful for the taste of where you come from Touching the velvet walls of your tabernacle that is hidden. I smear it on your mouth, puckered up and fight warm

You tell me you ache Like a dance to the melody of my chest So your life is an echo, arrhythmic and flirting with danger Like the memory of me between your shoulder blades For I only know how to worship distance I want a religion with no absolution And your omnipotence like God’s You tell me killing is wrong and I’ve shot a man for less Yet when you smell fire and brimstone on my breath On nights where we are more blood than dust Iron than rust You try to kiss it out like it means forgiveness A fool, even blind, could see the way your eyes stray You may be my idol, but you are not my priest

You are splinters that grow like thorns from palms Countless as corn that feeds itself from the ground Your hands are forever holding the shape of a cross Today between your fingers, forever above your bed I tell you that is more a guillotine than eternal life You are unfaithful When you swallow their spit by the mouthful It is corroded from the nickel in their teeth A metallic martyrdom mouthed by monsters You tell me to show you something that does exist So I joined us together like we were married And there I only inhaled on the heave of your breath As I told you true mercy is taking what you have been given

We learn language by imitation. Association. My father was built on those foundations, as we all are to some degree. Matthew 24:26. The foolish man builds his house upon the sand, rather than the rock. What do you do when you have no choice but to build yourself upon such instability? When sand is all you know, it seems inevitable to sink. My father was ridden with a poverty mindset. He would use superglue to keep false teeth in his head. He counted pennies for more than just a rainy day fund, hoarded them like a dragon upon its found wealth. How could I expect a man who had only known lack to expect its opposite? To make him appreciate the seasons of abundance? Raised with a gun to your head, you learn that violence is a sign of life.

We are told we outgrow our childhood. The feeling of being ignorant and too small, afraid, sometimes excited, by a world much larger than ours. We hope that the innocence within us is eradicated, because it is much easier to go on without that small still voice, the mustard seed of magic, that only a child can truly know. In moments of vulnerability, regardless of how my father aged, I saw him as a child, not a man. I think this is why, despite all that has come to pass, a soft voice within me calls myself to understanding, if not for the man that came to be, then for the boy that once was.

No, my brother is not my friend, but I am his keeper, and he is mine. It is a unique relationship that I am not sure anyone but a brother can truly comprehend. He is my priest. He has pardoned me before I have used my first breath to confess, but he has also chastised my sins before the action has ever come to pass. I have left my death in his hands and he, by his hand alone, has chosen to offer me life. I have trusted him with my life and he has butchered it until it is crimson, hollow and devastated. I have no other relationship in my life that compares to this. I have no one else who is cut from the very same cloth, that is as vastly bonded, and yet other to me. The truth is, that when you have a brother, you would give your still beating heart to him and not care for what he chooses to do with it. If my brother is to break me, beyond bone, deeper to the soul, I would still take that as an honour. If he were to cradle the very muscle that moves me with a tenderness unseen, I would believe that to be sacred.

I am the youngest in my family. I do not know what life is without my brother there beside me. Perhaps this is why I allow him his trespasses. The Lord’s Prayer. Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us. In the foolish way only a brother can, I believe I forgive any misdeed my brother has done for the blind faith he may do the same for me. That his love, his word, is so sure it rivals God’s. I want to believe that if my brother can give that to me, that certainty, that it will also be something I have to offer. When my brother falls, I see the weakness in my own limbs, and when he triumphs, I hold the smallest prayer that I may too. Are we not born from the same blood? Does whatever lives inside him, not also stay within me?

Prayer has taught me both to expect conversation, but also to regard a lack of response with the same reverence. Sometimes the need to speak comes out of the true purpose that it will reverberate back only to yourself. A void that echoes. What is spoken in the silence that returns to you? The message gets lost if you are to disqualify it before you even speak. Yes, it is true, maybe no one identifies with what you need to say. Perhaps it is lost to a greater crowd of people. Your words are too many, too little. Too confusing, too simple. I urge you to ask yourself what the words mean to you. In prompting such an urge, I ask myself the same question. Is it just as important, what you have created, what you have written into existence, if it is forgotten just the same?

I feel foolish, then, to think of myself in a constant state of metanoia. Conversion is complete. It is to rid yourself of something, if only to replace it with something untouched by your past. A baptism. Metanoia, then, would be to destroy the sky itself and conjure a new heavens for which you are to continually change upon. I find, even in all my changeability, there is stubbornness. A reluctance, so to speak. Or perhaps, an inability to truly change. To repent is to be truly apologetic. In this case, to repent would be to relent. To release. In all my change, I refuse to separate myself from my own origins, at least entirely. I believe we all have this obstinacy. To truly transform, to convert, is to participate in the act of creation. Genesis. Change cannot be formed without beginning. There can be no point of reference. Therefore, to change, to begin, must we not destroy? Destruction is seen as the enemy of creation. Death is seen as the antithesis of life. Do the two not circle each other? Is the act of creation not the destruction of an old falsehood? A belief? Allow yourself to be rid of every ideology. Every concept. What is left? What will you keep? What will you give birth to? To change is to destroy. To birth something new is to kill something old.

While forgetting and forgiving are not the same thing, I find there often is overlap, even if it is minor. Sometimes, forgiveness requires one to turn the other cheek, and in that action, you are looking away. Perhaps you do not forget, but you disregard. You let something linger in the peripheral. Blurred. Mosaic. This forgiveness, to relinquish a person, an action, an event, from your ire, is a gift. Not all deserve it.

Here is where it contradicts itself.

Forgiveness can be selfish. To forgive is to free yourself from the burden of hatred, contempt, and agony. To not forgive, is to punish yourself, to be trapped and confined by the actions of another. If I do not forgive, I do not let go. I hold on, I clutch. I have burdened myself with something I did not cause. A sin that is not mine to atone. A wrong I did not commit. Would it be fair then, to myself, if not to another, to hold on to such a thing? Forgiveness in this sense, should be for the self. It is selfish, and that is deserved. This does not mean it is easy. I would never claim that in one’s humanity, in the actions of every individual, forgiveness is required. That it heals. I find there is ego in such an absolute statement. I am not God. I am more of a mutt than a man, tied to nature. Instinct. Flesh.

Crucifixion.