A Choice of Gods

It feels like a barrier, this rope draped along the edges
of the bridge across the pond,
a thing meant to keep you from going further,
to keep you from…. there.

I don’t do well with barriers.
I have never been good with rules.
They chaif at my soul. I seem to have a need
to move beyond them, to slip under the ropes,

and inside the closed doors,
simply because it is there.
Not the best of traits,
one that at times has threatened to get me in trouble.

But not the worst of traits either.
I have seen things no one else sees,
the man behind the curtain, the inner workings,
love that was not meant to be, being.

I do not measure as other people measure.
I have come to grips with that.
Everything is a tradeoff and a choice
of which God you choose to satisfy,

until a rope, or a door becomes not a barrier,
but a choice.

About this poem

This one came out of nowhere. I know parts and pieces of where it came from, from choices made through the week, of my bad habit of going places that I am not supposed to go, of choices made and not made.

Other parts? They just showed up as I began writing.

The photograph was taken at a nearby nature preserve in Hebron, NY.

Tom