today we celebrate the emancipation of my brain
though twenty-one years ago I thought I was insane
i didn’t know i was peeping through an open keyhole
or that i didn’t need saving ‘cause i didn’t have a soul
still sometimes i wake in sweatened hellish fright
thinking of the cult’s control as I lie awake at night
the tendrils still grasp the minds of many whom i know
who believe i’m bound for a flaming destination below
“Twenty-one years ago” refers to the date I wrote
i am small, one of a very few poems written during the
time immediately after I left Bible college. In it, I was dealing with guilt and shame, holdovers
from my childhood brainwashing, thinking I was perhaps inescapably bound for Hell. But it
expressed hope at the end and a new life was coming.
“The cult”, of course, refers to Christianity, one of the most fiendish fictions ever
perpetrated upon human society.