Scriptures and Strictures

Wordsworth said nuns fret not / at their convent walls
I imagine Christians / are equally happy
with the walls / of their lives
for Heaven waits for them / the saved
space is saved for them / infinite space
in the presence of a God / omnipotent and omniscient
which messes with my mind / not bound by faith
Is God watching me write this poem?
Is He watching you read it?
Is it part of His plan / that I marvel
at the scriptures and strictures / I myself do not believe in?
in which I myself do not believe? / because that's better grammar
another set of rules to differentiate / between how we talk
and how we write / just being literate is a threshold we must cross
and stairs to keep climbing / the great books we read in college
when we were too young / to truly appreciate the wisdom within
so limited we were / by our youth and inexperience
so we wrote poems with enthusiasm / with passion
as if we invented erotic love / or at least sex
and what was wrong / with all the old people anyway
who had given up / the pleasures of the flesh
for the mind / and they thought / and thought
and told us our poetry was no good / a vomit spreading out
it needed form / we were just playing with the net down
the tennis balls crossing that center line / with ease
it was too easy / the water needed some cold
something more solid / a little rime / a little rhyme
and how about some recognizable meter / just for good measure
and don't even get them started / on light verse
or anybody popular / so we tried that / and it was mostly too hard
we liked it soft / but then we got all heady with linguistics
and the limits of language / to convey anything
of any substance / because they are insubstantial
a human invention / like God and religion and convent walls
just words / not the real thing / even words like Beauty and God
they're intangible / vast concepts / vast beings perhaps
or maybe even something of which we can't yet conceive
because we're so limited / so finite / so the words
paltry stick figures that they are / shadows on the cave wall
of the real thing / but they'll do / because they're all we've got
so we muddle through in our one-way through time sort of way
wishing we could see the future / or recover the past
which we can't / so we make the most of the moment
this now / these words / living a life with Love and Beauty
and God too if you've got room for Him / I don't mind
because I don't judge / I'm happy within my walls
and I'll let you be happy within yours / even if I think
yours are the wrong color / and your fence a little too high

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This poem was written in response to the Take It to the Limit prompt at We Write Poems.