“Mom”

I'll never buy you flowers.

Instead, I'll plant rose bushes

That weather through dead winters

And resurrect each spring

Just like the Christ you've taught me to pray to.

No candy to devour.

Such insolence.

Your insulin levels

Raised insensitively

Due to my gestation.

Instead, your soup, passed down, prepared, and ladled.

Neither cardboard heart

Nor cold call

Could do such love justice--

Not at all.

Instead,

I'll bleed my heart

At three feet per second,

Electrocute my brain

At two hundred fifty miles per hour,

And speak of its soft pains

At the speed of sound

How indeed I love thee.

You maketh me to lie down in time's sands

Inside still waters run deathly deep

Your red sea parted

Long enough to lead me to unpromised lands.

Forty days and forty nights cannot top forty weeks.

I've looked to the hills which came my help--

A mana El Shaddai claimed for myself

Even while blind, I knew to cleave.

I was lame when you told me to walk

And then, too, I believed

Proverbs provided one each day

For when I'd learn to read,

Yet I began to stray

As if, of you, I had no need.

Such lamentations led to revelations

I, your prodigal son,

Have returned

To gift you proof

Of furnace burns

And lashing streaks

And gnashings of my teeth

That you were right!

This, I lift!

This life that I've survived

This clean heart I provide since you forgive

No longer crucified.

All of this forever and always you--

The first God I ever knew.

--Tr1umph@nt!