One of this weeks Sacred Song Space challenges, was to write about water...I had been working on this poem off and on, for two months...it never quite "came together" until SSS issued the challange about water...for some reason "water" opened up a floodgate...as always, my poetry is revised until I submit...I have been busy working on a book or two...I will visit your blogs, all this week...
the third degree of guilt
is characterized by the small lies
one tells themselves -
the tiny mis-truths and titillating tales
and barely hidden smirks
it calculates and figures that since no blood
has been drawn
only insignificant hurts are inflicted
one, two hours later
to be forgotten
hopefully
the second degree of guilt
declares with patrician demeanor
all of the above
as the person shakes hands, with the injured party
after all
with sufficient remorse and mournful eyes
all will be forgiven
hopefully
it is that first degree of guilt
that concerns me
it is a maelstrom that consumes us
with oceans of blood washing everything and everyone
scarlet
it would take an act of an omniscient godling
to wash away its deposited detritus -
this decay which clings unremitting
it is a guilt that strews itself willy nilly
and fashions itself
parasitically to every global and racial memory
it is Oedipal, Elektra
it is Jungian and Freudian
it is false, eidetic
genetic, cellular and muscular
and we glorify it culturally
in all its horrific honorifics
we are beguiled by its crescents of fertility
its odes to Remus and Romulus
and paeans to David, the heroic murderer
its tales of Two Cities
and Babylonic comeuppances
we never forget
we can never forgive
because this guilt -
is never, ever sincerely
penitent
guilt is our self-regulation -- without guilt we do cruel things. 