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's likeness 

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 put away the Spider-Man 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 temptation 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 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.

So were you.

When I became a man

I put away childish notions

and quit pretending

every question

demands an answer.