Healing Liberty

For ten years the patient muddled through

And for eight more he managed the neglect and decline.

The festering sepsis soaked limb and liver.

Liberty Morris was broken and breaking.

Passively and actively

The insidious infections in his soul

Coupled with the toxins he ingested.

 

And the nurse arrived on a partly cloudy day,

Loaded the crab-walking fool into a Chevy Nova

For the rented pilgrimage to the clinic.

The pathetic wasting hirsute beast

Was loved and fretted over by the Philosopher Queen.

She had healing in her heart,

Courage in her spirit to spare.

 

Slightly old doctor Goidel Glas, examined patients near an olive tree.

Liberty stumbled, sprawled on the earthen clay, regarding the healer.

 

Mountebank, I have been ill for half my life, it suits me well;

My illness is now mine own self.

Conceal your cathartic contraptions and catholicons,

Restrain your pretended ancient knowledge

My condition precedes, exceeds, destroys a breathless cosmos.

 

No pill, no tincture, no intervention, no thing can heal the dead

Save a hypothesized cure which I have never heard of before,

Though I listen hourly for the thing that never has come.

It never shall.

Remove yourself from me and suffer the words of the ill:

 

I am the man from the beginning that recedes to sickness

To find strength through my own strength.

My ill wisdom is my authority, borne of my mastery of brokenness.

So you, hoarder of remedies, shall receive my dispensation.

Your treatment is my death, your remedy is my reduction.

 

The Philosopher Queen boldly loved him.  Still.

 

Goidel sang healing notes that eased the pain,

That soothed the mind and lavaged the entire spirit,

That fed the soul with a bread beyond description.

The Philosopher Queen offered down a strong, scarred hand,

Raised the old fool up, brought him back to the freedom of healing.

She saved him, healed him, with those songs, again and every day.

Elegy for a Man Who Never Was

When I stand beside the Ocean -

Perhaps a mate by my side -

I am humbled by the vast wide open,

Naked, collapsing, with nowhere to hide.

And the expanse arrayed before me

Formless and flat and wide,

Is the great earth's analogy,

For how a man is called to abide.

The opposite side is too distant

For a child to imagine its shore.

A father must in this life be regnant;

One for the child to adore.

A man begets his loved children,

And learns that he must rise in his soul

To form the clay into strong men

And satisfy the God-given role.

A one of the same was there at my side

The moment I birthed on the scene.

Would he had thrown his arms so wide -

A bosom like Abraham's for me to lean.

His life would not be measured by success,

Rather on the manliness he taught.

Worldly trophies not to be his dress,

But the struggles that he sore fought.

Rising from rest to find rest in spirit,

Wending his way to the daily hunt.

His return to our haven of comfort,

All failures of character abhorrent.

The man of the family divesting his heart

To be essence for the men he's making.

Emptying all from his part

Into the boyish containers needing.

The dream of my birth painfully dashed

When the man never came to fruition.

Instead the man found grossly stashed

A heart lacking in selfless ration.

Created damaged and madly broken

He never had a life he could divide.

The one who was to teach us to be men

Had no chance to be our ordained guide.

The helmsman that we hoped for

Took to sea and sailed over the horizon,

As three boys, along with generations more,

Longed for any man to call each of them son.

They gather on the sandy expanse

To look out on the exit he made.

The ocean to be illumined by his hand

Was left shrouded while his memory did fade.

This man we gather in chapel to mourn

Has not passed from the celestial mind's sight.

Though his presence we all do scorn,

Is remembered by He who is true might.

The man who never was

Is faintly remembered in heart.

His absence gives us great pause,

Knowing what should have been his part.

And my anger has to fade now,

For I have followed his route somehow.

I see his choices were made unfreely,

A psyche damaged by illness unusually.

I, a man, the same yet differently minded

With children of my own to whose needs I’m blinded,

I’ve tried my best and so repeatedly,

My guideless rudder minded poorly.

Three of mine own sent upon the waves,

And I am closer to leaning on staves.

I’ve failed them often though I hope they see

I’m frail and broke, and neither a captain of the sea

Will the end be better than the beginning received?

Or upon the waves tossed til mine own box is heaved?

The children I adore as my father never could

I pray that they love as best as he loved me should.