Certitude

 I was certain of many things.

When they told us an invisible man

was watching and keeping score,

I believed them.

I conjured the man in my imagination,

his likeness drawn from portraits

in the church foyer

and mother's dining room:

        tender, mesmerizing eyes,

        alabaster skin, scarlet sash over

        a seamless woolen tunic,

        an immaculately trimmed beard──

        leading man looks in 1979.

The relationship was fraught

from the get-go.

When they declared Halloween

Satan's Holiday,

I begrudgingly put away

the Spiderman costume

and joined my siblings in the basement

to hear our old man read scripture

by candlelight.

I tossed my Beatles

and Led Zeppelin cassettes

into the fire

to cleanse myself

of their demonic influence.

And I tried Christian Rock.

I really tried,

but its flagrant mediocrity only

aroused my enthusiasm

for secular music.

I endeavored not to permit

lust into my heart.

The man forbade it.

Lust crept in anyway,

day after day,

until the boundless temptation for sin

metastasized into

a crippling fear of girls.

We thought it best to

avoid girls altogether,

but there is no safe harbor

from an adolescent boy's

raging libido.

After my first nocturnal emission,

I wept,

certain I had offended

the creator of the universe.

I begged the man's pardon

as a great flood of indiscretions

washed over me.

I thrashed in the undertow

until the whole arrangement,

the surveillance,

the score-keeping,

the heavenly disappointment,

collapsed under the weight

of its sanctimony──

like a tent revival

in a hurricane.

The guilt drained off, thick and useless,

leaving only the sour film

of self-inflicted martyrdom.

Yeah, I was certain of many things,

but so were you.

When I became a man

I put away childish notions

and made of friend

of uncertainty.