Uncomfortable Truths
Maybe the perfect world we seek
Is not meant to be;
Maybe the bliss of heaven
Becomes hell for eternity;
What would we do
Without our body
Without a body
To touch,
To hug,
To feel,
To hear,
And to smell,
Even to see,
What would we be?
No, life is the gift,
An ecological-biological
Roll of the dice
That makes one exist,
Maybe more than twice
Because the probability
Infinitely precise.
Thrill does not come from goodness,
And playing nice;
Progress does not come from utopian decadence
And the disease called innocence.
We connect in this struggle
Called life.
Maybe good and evil are father and son,
Mother and daughter possessed in
Your young little one
Comprised of sperm and egg,
Desire?
We but run, run, run,
Runaway not from sin,
But from truth, and
In it, we create a myth of
Good, innocence, truth and love,
But fool ourselves from the good-evil within.
We like bad news, sensation, and rage, so that our hell
Seems safe and mundane.
If you seek heaven, it’s life that you miss,
And what is this?
Are you good because you love,
Or are you “too good”
to save yourself
Believing that only few will see heaven.
You think God knows not
The difference?
But s/he tells you this, “Tell me your story,
All of it,
And you will be judged
From what you miss.”
Are you so good now?
Can you cast these stones,
Or did you run out of th[time]em?
Maybe heaven is bliss.
Earl Yarington (LMSW) is a social worker and school bus driver. He taught literature and writing for nearly 20 years and spent 3 years working in forensic social work internships with offending populations, including work at Delaware Correctional facilities and the Federal Bureau of Prisons. He has a PhD in literature and criticism (feminism/women writers) from Indiana University of Pennsylvania, Master of Social Work from Louisiana State University, and an interdisciplinary Master of Liberal Arts from Arizona State University, where he studied the impact of visual image and girlhood in media/social media. He also has an MA and BS in English from SUNY College at Brockport. The opinions and analyses that Earl writes are his own and are not necessarily the positions or views of his employers, the agencies he supports, or that of his colleagues. Reach out with comments or questions.