Monday, November 28, 2022

The Only Tears Allowed are Tears of Joy


Jesse McCulloch Sigler, 8/23/91 - 11/27/22

The death of someone close 
Is not always a bed of roses,
Sometimes it's a highway crucifixion
On a Jesus guitar
At a roadside Golgotha 
Whose chord of God
We sound with our song
Not even knowing,
Merely joyous inside the prison,
As he insists, with the love
Only violence can show,
Where all I didn't know
Or couldn't understand,
The love at the center of the gift,
Black chariot and doomed messiah,
Winds back to teach me
What love feels like
As time solidifies.

And a most decidedly non-Roman Christ
Holds me strictly to happiness
In all that is left,
A few scraps of Metallica
From a happy metal scrapper 
Who would only consent
To work for the birds,
Whose dream home was a tree house in the woods ...

Ah but it veers into tears now
For the people he touched
And left no choice
But to accept him as he was
Walking round in circles
Over the mistakes you've made --
That toughest of pills to take
Has been waiting in my cabinet
For a long, long time,
Why he chose to set his joy
In the places people weep of
Trying to forgive, trying to understand
How bleakness unimaginable
Could spring such hope each day,
How those the most heroic
Had the fewest laurels of all...

I rested in his cool,
Though twists and turns unfathomable
Amid his constant laughter
Of compassion there to share
For we always knew, no matter how
Far apart, our hearts
Were one frequency of love
That came from that familiar place
That gets included here now too somehow
However thrown out with old sketches
To the lowest toy chest 
In the earliest room.

And as I understand him less and less
I feel released, to get it at last,
What he did for those he loved,
Which was everyone
Without condition,
His unblinking smile
Into a gaping hole,
A darkness so perpetual
One could witness the birth of light.