There is no sharing, no consoling.
No one to trust with the divulging.
“Jesus cannot atone what you’ve done.”
“God cannot love what you’ve become.”
I heard this as a child and it stuck with me.
My only chance for love relied on secrecy.
With no voice, no way of being heard,
I feared these thoughts would drive me mad.
Yet they said that I was mad already.
Is there no sharing for one so afflicted,
I mean, in the truest sense where thoughts
spill from my lips to your ears, unsifted
by the dark sentinel who ever stalks
the parapets and catwalks in my mind?
Are there no veins through which moods
course from my heart to yours, blood red
and raw, not these polluted black dregs
dumped illegally, furtively in the blinds.
Can I share with you the crooked thoughts,
of a fallen man, who crooked walked
miles through unseemly dens of vice
and shadow, from time to time?
Can I divulge the secrets of a crooked heart
that pulses love and squeezes rage, both
within the single staccato pattern of
systolic and diastolic thumps?
Love-hate. Love-hate. I would that it stop.
Let me lay my head against your chest,
and listen to the goodness of your heart
as you brush the hair away from my eyes.
Kiss my forehead gently and calm my thoughts,
lips barely grazing the dermal barrier between
your beauty and the ugliness that haunts my mind.
Wash me clean in the divinity of your acceptance,
righting all that was out of place. In your embrace
I have no need for the forgiveness of gods.
——
Teodor S. Jackson lives in Denver, CO with his husband of 19 years. Originally a creative writing major, he switched to a Computer Science mathematics degree but has continued to write in the interim. Working with composer Jay Kawarski, he wrote the libretto for a choral arrangement, Prayers for Bobby, based on the book of the same name written by Roy Aarons, which tells the powerful saga of a gay teen’s suicide. It was originally performed in Trenton by the Delaware Valley Men’s Chorus, with Marlo Thomas reading as the mother, Mary Griffith. This is his first published poem.