Liberation Theology

Open the gates and leave your life
Forget what
you were taught to love
Close your ears to dalliances
Play and
entertainment
Why pass your life at a child’s game
Surrounded by the doom
of numbers
Walk out of your life as out of a cave
For although you were a
stone
Now you are a flame

Put aside the language of death
And the
silence of lost traces
Buried in the lined faces
In all those rain-soaked
places
Where dark clouds descend like graces
And the wind turns the trees
to shawls

Give up your hoarded places
Crushed into narrow
spaces
Turning rehearsed pages
Among the frigid sons and daughters
Of
ritual and sameness
Querulous as your losses

Escape this Arlington of
aspiration
This wax museum of official dreams
The chill of  gauze
cathedrals
Your fragile-fingered monuments
Money the incubus you
invented
(Even now I hear it spending you)
Why dangle from time’s
jaws
Say it was the wrong life
Or say it was not yours

Come then
embrace refusal
At the place where history ends
Where all lies are
revealed
No matter how hidden
All ways of life rejected without
exception
Where the contented are tempted
And no nature is merely
accepted
Here you will find dissatisfaction
And learn denial’s
depths
You’ll have your fondest hopes to plunder
Your enemies will become
your friends

8/25-10/25/97, 1/27-2/10/98, 3/6-3/7/98, 6/19/98,
9/18-9/19/98
Copyright 1998 by Maurice Leiter
Posted with permission.