They were right Miss Lennon Father McLoughlin Sister Martina
Garner up the bushels of wheat
Assemble ruthlessly assemble
The Man within and above
Whose name is the Gentleman
Rigid and tall
For man is born sinful
As is obviously obvious
Born selfish vain untruthful inattentive and unclean
Unformed and disproportionate
Defects neither avoidable nor reparable
Therefore must you store away the wisdom of the ages
The old ways are of God
The new ways of the devil for example communism
Therefore must you inscribe upon your soul
As upon your flesh
The commandments and the precepts
Until at last you are possessed
Of and by a golem
If that word had not been contaminated by its history
And the preceptors spoke not that word
But it was the doctrine they intended
The Man made not of clay but of grain
So say instead The Great Man within and above
Call him Authority who is authorized to speak
While your unclean and untruthful self
Shall listen attend and heed
For you yourself are no gentleman
But instead a brute
A vice-ridden lowly animal
And thus for you is no salvation
For though you confess your sins
You do not examine your conscience thoroughly
You fail to recall the foul acts
That you commit by animal impulse
Like a dumb that is unspeaking animal
And you neglect to expose
The most shameful of your misdeeds
And instead meretriciously substitute
Plausible unexceptionable peccadilloes
So that your imperfect contrition
Yields only a feckless and null penance
And no absolution when He spews you from His mouth
And faith is a gift and in your vanity
You have nobody to blame but yourself
If you believe the gift to have been withheld
And worse you have no firm purpose of amendment
And you prefer to nurse the fleeting wish
That without renouncing the pernicious receipts
Of your debasement
You might somehow gain waiver
From expulsion into the outer darkness
Where you already reside
Hopelessly
And the suffering you now know will persist eternally
When in fact your only hope would have been
To assemble the grain-encrusted giant
In the days of your early childhood
While airplanes drop upon you atomic bombs
Therefore must you content yourself today
With the desire so unlikely of fulfillment
That you might at last hear and obey
Unto your own absolute infinite negation
And it is better never to have existed than