Jack Pelham

There is surviving the injury itself,
And there is surviving
Whatever one tells oneself about it.

I simply must remember
That he who sounds like a jerk
May simply be a poor communicator.

It’s stupid, you say,
To start working a puzzle
Before you’ve got all its pieces
Laid out on the table.

I saw a snake—
Quite a large one, actually—
And some days afterward,
When most of the excitement had subsided,
I realized in my quieter moments
That I had begun to feel as if,
By appearing to me unannounced as it had,
The thing had done me wrong,
And owes me an apology.

But I try to be fair about these things,
And I should tell you that
After ample consideration,
I have not yet imagined a way
By which the thing
Might have broken it to me gently
That it was there.

Ask a few questions in a single post (in a topical discussion group) and observe how the average joe responds. See how often it happens that he answers one question and doesn’t touch the others—and makes no mention of why he’s ignoring the others.

We look back in disbelief
At the horror of the sins and errors
Of a generation past,
Shaking our heads
At how anybody could have
Been involved in that,
And glad that we know better ourselves.

But surely our generation
Has its own sins and errors,
And in time,
Others will look back on us
In similar disbelief.

And we will have spent our time
Saying too often,
“We thank you, Lord, that we
are not like those sinners from the past.”

Having missed the point,
Naturally, they wouldn’t see
That they have missed the point—

Unless they have done as some do,
Missing it on purpose.

And that’s a whole new
Can of worms.

What if the Bible doesn’t tell us everything—

And what if we
Were to assume
That it does?

What could possibly go wrong
With that?

What if God doesn’t talk like us—

And what if we
Were to assume
That he does?

What could possibly go wrong
With that?

It is a puzzling irony of this world—
Filled with the various human passions—
That even the holiest of them
Should ever have to be set aside
For the mundane necessities of life.