It would be so incredibly hard
To keep on ignoring the ever-present lessons
You have yet to learn—
To keep on putting off being sorry for your sins—
And apologizing for how you’ve hurt others—
And righting the wrongs—
And admitting your fault—
And seeing the mistake in it—
And letting it sting you as it should—
And making a plan to learn your way out of the habit—
And letting penitent tears cleanse your soul.
They tell me I’m a fairly creative and inventive person,
But I’ve been mulling this for a few years now,
And I just can’t come up with a way for a person
To ignore such a huge backlog of ought-to
For as many years as so many seem to ignore it,
Unless the trick were simply
To find some way to switch all that off.
That is, to find a way to distract oneself—
Or dull oneself—
Or redirect oneself—
Or re-frame the problem—
Or reassign the blame—
Or to lie to oneself about intending to fix it soon—
Or to get drunk—
Or high—
Or to jump into the lulling stupor of depression—
Or the chase of some new intrigue or other—
Or to jump into some worse trouble still.
—Whatever it takes to stop hearing it
For what it is—
That echoing charge against you,
That you are not right with this world
And with the God who created it,
And that you need to back up a few steps
And make the thing right.
