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Rae, how could I have failed: Rae, how could I have failed to comment on this very earliest poem of yours on PostPoems?  I see that even Afzaul Shaq managed to comment (and also, as was customary, to insert an allusion to his political beliefs).  I am sorry I let you down by failing to visit this poem in a timely manner.  I hope that, now in Heaven, you have some idea of how much I miss you, and that I am truly sorry for failing to comment on your earliest poem.

As always with these poems, I: As always with these poems, I applaud your style.  This poem's second and third stanza are particularly eerie.

Love can be complicated, but: Love can be complicated, but how well you turned the cyclone of the human condition into remarkable art! You spun some impressive word play in this hard-driving expression:   "Crushing the pages I used to hide in . . ." "you struggle to continue a story that ends just like this" "We love like weapons sing" And my favorite: "I want to love like I can't change"   It's true that, most often, we just need to leave our creations alone, but I enjoyed where you went with this. A pleasure to read and comment on.  

Thank you for this.  I think: Thank you for this.  I think this poem has been brewing in me since Autumn of 1976.  During the first term of my freshman undergrad year, I was placed in three courses that were among the several required of all students in order to graduate (no incoming freshman selected their first terms' courses).  The middle course of the day was a Religion 101, taught by exactly the same sort of pompous blowhard that I have tried to imitate in the poem.  His very often repeated summary of his purpose was that since we still couldn't know what really happened to Jack Kennedy in Dallas in '63, we sure could not know what happened outside of Jerusalem in about 30AD on the morning now known as Easter.  Because he did not seem to recognize the existence and purpose of Faith, he judged everything by the quantity of knowledge that could be obtained.  When I watched him make one of my classmates cry because she could not express her faith in terms of historical knowledge, I felt the beginnings of a long and abiding contempt for him.  It is his sort that both give scholarship a bad rep, and also deserve to be parodied and pilloried as I have tried to do.

Satirical gold!   Your wry: Satirical gold!   Your wry wit crackled fiercely throughout your parody, cleverly enlivened with a realistic tone very recognizable as something spoken by an armchair historian. One can almost hear pompous, quasi-intellectual inflections and highbrow drawls in the diatribe. Beautiful!   And of course it's funny (And refreshing!) because that sort of biased and convoluted persuasion is identifiable and, for many people, it hits very close to home. Using this oration as a caricature of some Biblical "experts" was a flash of brilliance. Point made!     I devoured this with laughs and pleasure.    

I applaud this very poignant: I applaud this very poignant poem, and its simile, but I dearly hope that you need not run back into the darkness, but into the glorious light of the next, and everlasting, life.

It is not the Golden Rule,: It is not the Golden Rule, expressed by Christ Himself, that requires any amendment:  it is human nature that requires amendment in order to observe the precept acceptably.  And I speak as a very flawed and fallible (and multiple) failure to observe acceptably.