Hell sometimes can be a comforting thought
When you consider the promise
of some ire of comeuppance
some reasoned placement
of interminable exile
for the ******* who deserve to end up there.
When all is considered,mortal pain working as the ruse
for an endurance of condemnation
(Mothers still wailing in their sleep for closure two generations on)
Mortal oppressors deserve to be confronted by a special kind of fear
It makes sense
The punishment is apt
Guilt has to work both ways.

But that thought is still not a resolution for me
Particularly as the opposite does'nt attract
Given the fact that I've spent the majority of my life
Frightened of Christ.

It has its origins in my own childhood
when I remember back
To when I hurried weary past
the old imposing church
on my way into town
When I was a four-year old believing
If I was'nt quick
The whole-heaving Bulk of it
would tumble flatly
upon my fragile frame
The old road home
eventually winding its way
to my limbo of soothing distractions
that childhood’s orchestra of daydreams
so fleetingly informs.

Senior Infants Religion class did'nt help either
getting to grip with the crucifix and the like
my parents having sheltered me from the harsh realities of martyrdom
and the cold damp mass congregation on empty Sunday mornings
and the scowl of that year's teacher
who had complained that I wrote too much like a spider's web
Giving us throatfuls of original sin and the rhetoric of  Easter Monday
and my childhood innocence
exposed in the opinion spoken aloud
to a classroom of trained apatheticals
that not only did I not believe that Jesus Christ was the son of god
but that he never existed either
perhaps history disproves my claim on the latter
but the former is still full of endless possibility.
(And all this before I read anything about what really went on during the Twentieth Century-Dear accomplice,I can already hear your sweetened cackle.)

Yet still faced with that emblem of womanhood’s inheritance,I accepted my first compromise of all too humane sympathies.
Bleeding Mary Immaculate,she who suffers,she who in her suffering
silently invokes that long,unquestionable certainty of life,that jump-lead rattle of conscience
and contemplation,she whose warm moments in stony acceptance of fate’s misfortunes eventually led me down that scented path where all my troubles truly began.

Christ himself continued to present
(however loud the familial chorus
attempted to reprimand my nurtured,
after-school-scepticism)those same
tingles of spinal sensitivity,that same
epidemic-like aversion,years after I had
left that winter playground where children
splashed puddle water at each other
to make reputations,and shouted mispronounced obscenities
as a means to show they had no time whoever wanted to act adorable that day.
(The first chance they were given they realised the bluff-ladder of office mentality.)

I could never really face staring
into the eyes of the owner
of that sacred heart
for more than five seconds
He accused me of far too much
without having any notion
of who exactly I was
As I got older teachers
tried to convince me
that he really was
full of love and understanding
but those portrait-painted deepest-blue eyes
could lead to a war criminal's breakdown.

And I was’nt willing to take
the sack and ashes
for any man.