Amen – a poem by Rupert M Loydell

Amen
 
He is his own patron saint,
martyr to the cause, victim
of well-meaning ignorance.
His halo is a dinner plate,
his piety affectation.
 
He is his own saviour,
interlocutor between life
and death, will do anything
to avoid humiliation,
even crucify himself.
 
He is his own prayer
but does not know
how to talk to absence
or persuade the world
to find its own salvation.
 
He is his own proclamation
about what is to come;
his own declamation,
his own exclamation mark,
own unfulfilled prophecy.
 
He is his own creation,
trying hard to become
who he has decided to be,
yet often seeing himself
walking the other way.
 
He is his own undoing,
will betray and desert
all he knows and loves,
will lay down and die
just like everybody else.
 
He is his own resurrection,
stepping in footsteps
left in the desert,
endlessly circling,
out of his thirsty mind.
 

Rupert M Loydell is a writer, editor and abstract artist. His many books of poetry include Dear Mary (Shearsman, 2017) and The Return of the Man Who Has Everything (Shearsman 2015); and he has edited anthologies such as Yesterday’s Music Today (co-edited with Mike Ferguson, Knives Forks and Spoons Press 2014), and Troubles Swapped for Something Fresh: manifestos and unmanifestos (Salt, 2010)