Being in Dullness

I saw your earthly remains and I felt nothing.

There was a time where I would have felt this nothing

Because I knew nothing.

Because I was cruel, and petty, and selfish,

as only humans can be.

Then there was a fire,

Lit in me that I could not, would not

dare

to stop.

Perhaps if you had revealed yourself then

I would have wept,

Or prostrated in public.

But now...

What should I call myself?

Apostate? Heretic? Normal?

You, immune in parinirvana, my pleas mean

something unknowable.

I know better than to ask these questions,

To be scolded with a tale of patients with puncture wounds,

Too annoyed, too determined to know something,

Putting off the treatment because

They

Can't

Believe

The situation or that it could ever have come to be.

Now that your descendants have taken

Their pound of flesh.

Now that the nectar has been returned to

puss and blood.

Now.

I ache to be devout,

But the doors are closed in ways

None of us would have ever believed possible.

I am the disgusted zealot,

I am the disgusting failure to practice,

I am the one by the wayside,

Waiting for the path to practice me,

As all falls into incomprehensibility.

Magic has been scoured from my bones,

And when I see you,

Worse than nothing,

I doubt the truth of these baubles.