Untie Me

Written June 2008. Spoken Word. Performed RETRO Revolutionary Open Mic.

I am the first to fail at this:

                Live selflessly, and you will find bliss.

I am the first, I must admit

                to serve, until it gains me nothing—then I quit.

I am the first to be the one that holds out a hand toward the homeless,

                not to ease their burdens, but to ease my conscience!

                                Not to help them,

to help me…

I am the helpful hand that helps itself

To whatever it can reach upon the shelf.

 

And yet I loathe Crime!

I despise Corruption!

But, ye who are untruthful,

                are the first to hate untruth,

and the last to make it true.

 

Look at me, just look!

Can you see that,

                even as I accuse,

                                I am the crook!

Look, and can you relate?

                From within me,

                                flows that which I hate?

 

I would live for others, if I could,

                to right the wrong and trade ill for good.

But it’s a beautifully tragic realization to which I come

                that my twisted soul,

                                ‘tis a knot that cannot be undone.

 

I am a poetically simple manifestation

                of the infestation within us,

                so how do we come clean?

                How do we turn just?

                How do we repent,

                                when we are fallen thus?

 

If there was one—one!—who did not live as we

Who never hated, never wronged, spoke ill of, unlike me,

Who never lied, never hurt, nor, what was not his, retained,

Never trampled, nor worshipped himself, nor himself maintained,

I think, then, we’d be O.K.,

we’d call it good, or even a day.

But who knows such a man?

Surely not you or I,

for all the best whom I have known have failed by farthest cry.

If humble, they know it,

                if prideful, they deny,

We yearn for the perfect, but the standard is too high!

 

Utopia is a myth!

It holds no pith,

                Nor Meaning Substance, with

                                Which to cure these ailing bones that barely hold us up!

You may call this Life a glass half-full,

                but it’s still not a whole cup.

 

But I know one! One, yes, I know one,

Who, against our own inadequacy, has won!

One who won our hearts when he won our battles,

Making One what was broken, and silencing what prattles,

When he did what need be done and loved how we could not,

When he reached within my twisted soul, and—swift!—untied the knot.

When he lived among the dying, and for them then chose to die,

 

And now lives.

 

There is nothing quite like a Savior who comprehensively gives.