Confessions and Opium Cheaters

Modern poetry modern verse contemporary poetry contemporary verse modern poem contemporary poem 

The truth at last is what we always knew.

Religions, riff raff earnestness, have tried

To obfuscate that truth.  Their priestly crew

Attempted to convince that truth spills wide

As universal oceans made of stars,

Or larger, deeper than the Milky Way

And all such galaxies as harsh as haar

Across the vacuum of space, its spray

As fathomless, unknowable—and so

The faiths stepped in across our eons, stretched

Ten thousand truths as Arctic iceberg floe,

But found no Absolute unveiling etched.

  We’ve always known that all earth lives are brief.

     Religions just anesthetize our grief.

I ran into pagodas, and was fixed for centuries at the summit or in secret rooms: I was the idol; I was the priest; I was worshipped; I was sacrificed. I fled from the wrath of Brama through all the forests of Asia: Vishnu hated me: Seeva laid wait for me. I came suddenly upon Isis and Osiris: I had done a deed, they said, which the ibis and the crocodile trembled at. I was buried for a thousand years in stone coffins, with mummies and sphinxes, in narrow chambers at the heart of eternal pyramids. I was kissed, with cancerous kisses, by crocodiles; and laid, confounded with all unutterable slimy things, amongst reeds and Nilotic mud.

~ Phillip Whidden