Devil in the Details and God Everywhere Else
You’re camped out on my tongue;
Radiating divine patience,
Beatific compassion,
Or whatever it is you are wont to do.
Though you make your presence known,
In moments of extremism,
Riding on the back of anger or eagerness and
Usurping perfectly good swearwords.
I’m not sure where you came from.
I suppose you sneaked into my head
During the programming of childhood,
Lost in the language.
After all you’re encoded there now,
Along with healthy doses of irony and self-loathing.
A fixture.
Like the weather or a fear of change.
Your rituals half practiced
In skewed and smeared forms;
Sunday morning inaction,
An unspoken reverence of churches
And the trinity of ceremony for birth, marriage and death.
And it falls on the godfull and the godless alike,
This dim wash of religion.
With even the most severely secular
Under the yoke of your influence.
We don’t shed beliefs lightly;
Don’t let custom fall away on a whim,
Or for anything so frivolous
As an utter lack of faith.
