Jack Pelham

The behaviors that now get one labeled as a “narcissist”
Bear a striking resemblance to those for which
Certain toddlers used to earn efficacious spankings.

What a pitiful thing—
That good conviction
Spouted from the lips of a fool—
Defiled by association,
And less likely than before
To be pondered fairly
By those competing fools
Who do not happen
To hold it already.

She dutifully admits to error,
But assumes it to be
Much smaller in scope
Than it is.

And while she has an inkling of this,
She cannot bring herself
To see it
As an error in its own right—
As equally in need
Of admission
As the first.

The one man,
Faced with the prospect of an existing God,
Cannot help himself
But to cast off
In a voyage of the imagination,
As if to decide by fiat
What this God must be like.

It is a make-believe love,
In which he pretends
That pretending to love
Is the actual essence
Of loving itself.

Start it now!

He is undone
In his argument
But too blind to see it.

He has lost touch with this reality
Even as he pounds away at others—
His affect screaming
That reality matters
And that if they know what’s good for them,
They had all better give heed to it.

And this moment is a tragedy
And a shame for him,
Whether he sees it or not.

And the stopwatch is ticking
As the Universe measures the span
From now until he yields himself
To the obvious.

Let us carefully choose
From among these
Myriad gems of virtue
But a few tokens—
That we might hollow them out
To a mere shell of what they were,
So as to more easily carry them about
Wherever we go,
As a signal to all that
We hold virtue to be
Of the highest importance.

Not all weirdness comes from messed-up church doctrine, but I’m having a hard time thinking of any messed-up church doctrine that doesn’t lead eventually to some sort of weird behavior, however large or small it may be.

There is in many an assumption
That conversion to Christ
Is but a short process,
Involving little more
Than the adoption
Of a new axiom or two,
Such as that Jesus is Lord—
Or in the case of the particularly eager,
Jesus is my personal Lord and Savior!

It is a pernicious mistake
By which the one
Wrongly assumes the blame
For the faults of the other.