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.
