Pray

Memories of days threaten to outgrow
Like children who now
Yearn to escape protective parents
I must write this down lest
I forget and so the world will not know
How the nuns in the convent school
Scared me forever from
All things holy as I endured school
And drowsed on the desk
Their soul fermenting punishments
Ripened like revulsion
made to stand in the sun after assembly for every mass
for every confesion that was missed
At age seven at the top of the class with a board “sinner”
the confession queue of juvenile
third graders future migrants to hell
added me on
I was eager to say whatever but could
Not quite sift through my actions
I tried to pull out of the bucket of my brain
The bad things I’d done like shells from the sand
Worry and fear congealed like
Dried mud after a dance in the rain
And hell beckoned
“what have you done?”
" I have sinned father"

I don’t believe
I don’t believe
I don’t believe