Bedward

Wind the alarums,
I’m bedward bound.

Just like the man in Psalm 6:6
I swim, though not through
tears of cruel distance from God
but torn pages of guilts
and shame and old pictures.
A sea formed of paper on which
my sins are charted, studied, sketched.
Maybe its distance from God after all
that inspires the sea.

Either way I do not cry,
divorced as modern man so often is
from close relationship
with cat o’ nine scourges, bleeding
the nightly transgressions from back
and shoulder blades.

My closet door yawns wide,
my couch is made and left.
The ancient man was bedward bound
by guilt. The modern is bedward bound,
then free.
He’s invented the subconscious
and locked the guilt inside.