Namaste
The god in me does not honor
the god in you. The god in you
murdered me once, and once
was more than enough.
So the god in me, adept
at keeping my nature warm
and inspired to love the benign,
now prefers the chilly air
of indifference, something picked up
like a virus from the most vicious
of mortals. The god in me
regards the god in you
as suspect, though sad
to say, it wasn’t always so.
There were the generous days
in the beginning, when every word
was made flesh. In the beginning
the gods in us were content
to let us go on
behaving like perfect mortals,
which is to say imperfectly,
which is to say with our tenderness
fully intact: the good kind
that let us gladly undress
our trepidations, and pleasure
our solitude into a blissful
oblivion; and the bad kind—
invisible woundings
no compliment or hot kiss,
no confession of the amorous
could soothe for long.
And then, when the mortals we were
had done enough to remind us
that to be mortal is to be susceptible
to the secret agenda, the cruel caprice,
the soft but eviscerating voice—
“at the mercy of a nuance”—
the god in you decided it was time
to act. A dark god, in need
of a human sacrifice, smoothly turning your back
on the earnest and their pathetic pleas.
So the god in me, no stranger to the aberrant
and the abhorrent, now has no choice
but to respond in kind. A pity, really,
since it has been the dream
of so many gods to find themselves
in some quiet room, the burden of power
slipped off and scattered
like clothes across the floor, the light
of late afternoon a kind of benediction,
and everywhere the gratitude
for the privilege of feeling
almost human.
Copyright Credit: Thomas Centolella, "Namaste" from Almost Human. Copyright © 2017 by Thomas Centolella. Reprinted by permission of Tupelo Press.
Source: Almost Human (Tupelo Press, 2017)