Forgiveness

 

I was 18,

had only started driving

and didn’t realise a main road

was ahead.

I just snoozed my way across

—thought I had the right of way,

no less.

I grasped the madness of my fault

as I sailed across the bitumen.

—A streaker across a warzone;

some bird through the blades of a turbine.

I could have been crushed.

I was never in control.

I was nothing. I could have been killed.

Are we ever in control?

Our passions—anger, sadness—come and go.

They’re not in our control.

We’re told, of course, they are,

but trimming hedges back will never kill a root.

Falling in love and breaking up:

they, too, are not in our control.

Even times I’ve done the breaking up:

I wasn’t really in control

of anything

at all.

The moves I make to cook my food:

I do them out of hunger

or habit: both out of my control.

Being born, my earliest tears,

or all the tears I’ve ever cried:

no control.

Then the time

I almost died

on some main road.

We’re not in control.

It calls for forgiveness, really,

of everyone.

Even yourself.

I think we learn to forgive

when we see

we’re none of us

in control of our lives;

or, we learn how to love

when we see

we’re not

even truly

alive.

The breaking wheel

 

Back in Old Europe,

by swollen Church

and funky dress,

they kept a thing in the

back pocket

of the zeitgeist:

the breaking wheel.

The condemned were

tied down,

the enormous wheel

dropped

on

every

limb.

Drop.

Smash.

Drop.

Smash.

Smash.

Smash.

Life

for the tortured

—at such a frequency—

must feel more like death

might feel

if death could feel like anything.

The broken bones would then

be threaded through the spokes,

the puppet of flesh

hoisted up

to parade its screams

to a crowd.

For those most damned,

the Reaper took its time in riding in

to haul the soul away,

the meat

scavenged

by beasts.

The condemned

were criminals,

but how that fits

fails me.

They might have used the breaking wheel themselves;

that wouldn’t make it right,

only worse.

But here’s no study of justice.

Here’s no study of anything.

No final thought,

no sombre lesson to be learned,

save for

life is hard for all,

and, for some,

death unspeakable.