Jack Pelham

America could not stand
To fight the losing battle
In time of war.

When you’re dealing with things
That most would rather ignore,
Don’t be surprised if it’s hard
To find good conversation
About it.

For all you know, you may be
The first among your friends
To take it seriously.

Having already declared to himself
His glorious intentions for the week,
He dismisses the wasted day
As a mere trifle,
And with the wave of a hand—
Not counting it as a lost seventh part
Of a heavenly treasure,
But rather twistedly,
As if its murder were somehow a proper and fitting
Sacrifice to the honor of the whole.

And I should unapologetically
Think the man insane
Even if he were me.

As I scan the scriptures, I see that
God has chosen to measure by eternity
And sometimes by ages—
And by millennia
And generations
And lifetimes.

I fight the battle against the flesh—
To keep it in check—
To not “let myself go”—
To swim against the tide of a sloppy society
And live by good principle and wisdom
Rather than merely by fleshly desire
And convenience
And unvetted assumption.

One could blame God, of course,
That there are on this Earth
So many desirable things
That we are warned
Not to desire.

Perhaps the gosh-awful dumbest thing that
We’ll remember about our time here
On this beautiful-ugly planet
Is how often we split
Ourselves into
Two huge factions
Taking sides in a debate
In which both sides were wrong.

The best argments
Are the ones in which
The truth wins.

And they cast an idol to worship
Thence forward
From an arbitrary interpretation
Of their own choosing,
Giving not a thought to whether
They ought first consider
The other possibilities.

It is difficult to think of a human habit
That is more counterproductive than is
That of operating under a bad assumption.