Have fAiTh FaiTh faITH, So Help You!

easy it is, now, to believe that fear rules all

and faith is dead, deceased in the mind,

relinquished years ago, slipped and slunk away,

fallen somewhere along the paths we crossed,

lost but never found, seamlessly left, abandoned,

rotting on a scorching, stained sidewalk with droplets from an ice cream cone running down my hand,

my fingers slick and sticky with chocolate sweetness,

or icy and still, never to move again, sitting alongside a small shovel, frozen in the snow

next to a snowbank once bigger than my entire body,

encompassing all of me, towering tall like a god,

bigger than anything I would ever see or know again

fear is learned; faith is gone, so gone, so missed

I think of it sometimes when I hate myself so much

I could scream, rip my hair out, rip my eyes straight from

my skull, gore myself with the power of my own resentment—

gore the child, too, that laughed and prodded at the snow,

red-cheeked and freezing cold, happier than she would ever be,

smiling ear to ear, like sin wouldn’t one day ooze from those innocent hands,

like death would never crawl around the corners of her home

like a centipede, daring and darting, sickeningly fast, gone with a single blink

faith, now, is nowhere to be found, dead and cold

like a corpse, fraudulent and uninviting, never the same;

never the childhood dream you thought it was that you had,

never that exhilarating zen-like feeling you felt that day at church,

or that one afternoon outside in the sweet-smelling air,

with the flowers under your nose and the power of Mother Nature in your veins, coursing like a river

faith is nonsensical, absurdist, for the faint of heart,

for the kind, for the true—for the perfect people

will I find it, then, in the pocket of a small sweater

once worn out in those bitter winters of old, something warm and cherishing, something that can be cupped and held

like a loved one before being released again to the wind up into the trees, soaring up and up and away—

a fleeting wish, a momentary savior, for a smaller, better self