A Whole Wall is Filled

Poetry is in high demand;—

A whole wall is filled.

Mine, mine, for my own foolishness

Are not there.

 

A family telling me I am wasting my time…

Everyone telling me I have no future.

Already giving up on me as lost

Because I took a calculated risk…

I dared to have what everyone else could.

I begin to believe them

And on the eve of every success

I threw down my reigns

And halted the course.

 

I cannot make it too easy.

Am I Jude or a Prince of Tyre?

Metaphorically speaking

I could be neither nor both.

I could be living out a vision—

About to get the success

I dare not even covet…

 

No, I rather dread success.

But, to eat from this labor…

Sorrows nary found—

A few humble devotees

To my religion of Christ

Who do not believe in my Fairy Tales…

Rather I would want them to have the peace

I have when listening to The Silmarillion.

 

Rather, the trauma from the trenches

Forced his mind into strange places.

Broke him… sweat and blood

Bayonets and fractured bones

Bullets. Heads splitting

Arms severed, entrails gorged by lead.

All there in those miserable trenches

Of World War One—

The war we’d rather forget—

Where Tolkien wrote his first stories.

 

For me it was much the same.

Though I hadn’t fought in any war.

No… rather, it was a car accident.

Bloody it was. It set me on this course.

The violence tasted

Needed to come out.

 

It was asked by my friend J.D.

“I don’t know what God would say about

“This Silmarillion.”

There it is, in words beginning like John’s Gospel.

 

My mind jumped to a thousand metaphors…

Melkor, I have a hunch, was as much Tolkien as

Any of his other inventions.

The dark secrets of such violent fantasies

Is that violence needed to be purged.

There, a man as intelligent as him

Had to use his mind for something

Or else it would break.

Creativity is a gift from God

And MUST, in the life of every genius,

Be exerted to its fullest for Christ.

 

Regardless, I would hope that my reader pleasantly

Sees in my words

The same kinds of things I see in The Silmarillion.

Not that Tolkien or myself were inventing new religions

But rather, must have made something for our minds

In that gorgeous texture—

To occupy, and therefore, make sense out of this violent world.

A world where friends could be taken at a minute’s glance…

 

Everything else that could be said would disturb my current peace.