Kiss My ring

Rome, still got a complex about Scots

Ghosting through

four countries

without problems/friction/

bother

no-one even noticed

me sliding

across borders

only St Peter

has me run

through the computer,

things don't

 bode well

for the afterlife

checking 

my credentials already

I thought you were

meant to be dead

before the judgement

was announced

^Our God is closed

to the likes of you* 

Reviews

[Eilis]

What first strikes me about this one is that combo of the title and the last two lines. Forgetting everything else, this sets the poem sandwich up as a sort of battle between two differing camps. The church and the layman or the regular citizen long considered incapable of managing the spiritual by the church.

Scripture itself used to be kept from ‘the flock’ and William Tyndale was burned at that stake in 1536 for his heresy of translating the bible into English. He said: “I defy the Pope and all his laws. If God spare my life ere many years, I will cause the boy that drives the plow to know more of the scriptures than you!” And the rest is history.

Of course he’s not the only one to set himself up against the established order, but, to my mind, it goes to show that there is a difference between the church and the spiritual realm. The church itself often being closer to something demonic.

But, pardon my digression, it’s a big topic for me. I suppose what I like most about your poem is the way it is like the everyman against the larger societal construct. A regular bloke just wishing to be one of the many filtering through, but finding himself barred for reasons that remain unclear. But the ambiguity of the situation speaks for itself when the outsider encounters it because the outsider understands these little ostracisms. They are part of the fabric of his/her existence.

The format reminds me of a queue with people weaving in and out as they await their own moment of judgment. The dull-suspense of the thing and then the understanding comes. Man has long believed himself a fair judge despite the edict to judge not. One of the many ironies of human societies said to be based on the gospel of love.

I find the ending satisfying in that I read it as coming from the speaker/storyteller. Holding a candle up to the dark moment and showing the truth of it. It’s a lovely satisfying slice. Clean and only seconds away from drawing the blood that will stain the imagined purity of the judge’s mind.

Great poetry, Gram.

[gram linski]

aye well the Pope didn't think so, wrote this in marker pen on the steps outside, haha, thanks Eilis, loved the last line, my, what a dark soul you have, lol,as ever you are spot on with your insight, the legal age for consensual sex in the Vatican is 12, now the place is full of priests, why the f**k would you need that piece of law,

[Eilis]

That’s a disturbing tidbit of information indeed.

As for my dark soul...I have to keep up my goth cred somehow, haha.