STRANGLING HEAVEN

 
How do you know that
you’re strangling heaven?
Taught to irrelevant
standardized scales.
Taught to be standardized,
Christian White Males
or wherever you’re placed
and timed.
Taught to believe the sublime
is but an affectation,
drug-induced hallucination,
not to be relied upon
when creditors come to call
demanding payment
for providing you bare life.
Selling your soul for nickels and dimes,
the working-class creed.
Giving in to everyday crimes,
habituated to need
secondhand pleasures,
pirated treasures
that never succeed in
destroying the pain,
the long season of Hell
you strive to explain
“it’s his fault” “it’s their fault”
“it’s my fault”
all victims of blame.
And you’re strangling heaven.
You’re making it impossible to survive,
denying your passion to thrive,
denying your worth,
the blessing of birth onto
this mortal stage.
You pace in your cage
as if castrated of will.
And heaven so wants you,
expands to embrace you, offers
your most deeply hoped for love,
boundless rapture, eternal bliss,
every wish of your soul
exquisitely fulfilled.
Heaven offers you her open hands;
and you, in hellish nightmare,
strangle her
unaware.