Persistent honesty

Persistent honesty                                                                                  

The monk’s cell is bare except for solitude. 

Plenty of that which I have shouldered

outside these walls my whole life –

marked by it, encapsulated, enisled.

Is it everyone, I wonder, or just me? 

Much like I wonder if there is not

at the heart of everyone, where the self stands

naked before its own illegitimacy,

an inherent antipathy yoked with a desperate longing

for that which is True; that which is Whole -

the solitude of the monk’s cell

and our impenetrable selves

merely the lonely, persistent honesty

of every beating human heart.   

O child of God, the self is built

of fallacy, reclusion and alarm.