The Half-Hearted Conquest of a Half-Hearted Christian

Dec 30, 2011 | Erotic, Gus Stevens, Quatrains, Regret, Sinner's Psalms vol. 1 | 0 comments

We agonize like enemies, like spies,
before the King’s abundant table spread;
we’d consume each other, but only chew instead.
The glimmering creatures are full of lies.

We tongue the scraps and bones but cannot feed
and though we do not drink, our lips are full of red;
we knead the dough but cannot eat the bread.
Our hands turn up the soil but only spill the seed;

Amateurs rehearsing a pantomime of sex,
we are unthinking, rushed, estranged beginners.
The flesh agrees but something still objects;
we are shrinking, hushed, half-hearted sinners.

Thrilled yet fearful explorers forced to set
sail for a strange and undiscovered world,
we find the circling globe more full of wet
than we imagined when our sails at first unfurled.

Strengthen your resolve; we have not come to settle.
We are Pizarros come to take our prize—
conquistadors clothed with cross and metal.
We are glimmering creatures full of lies.

Our feet march out against a nameless foe
with steps, drawn twice by greed and once by fear,
to conquer brutes of stick and stone and bow—
to claim what will be ours; there is no other here.

We draw our guns and, with wild aim, we fire—
not at women or men, or girls or boys,
but at the heathen flesh that holds our one desire.
Our triumph is all flash and muffled noise.

With jaws close sealed, no listener detects
the mute conspiring of this joint conquest.
But still we cannot savor weak half-finished sex—
‘neath crumpled sheets, we are but half undressed;
are paralyzed between half-parted thighs.
…Yet with all these halves we cannot make a whole.
The glimmering creatures are full of lies.
We can neither keep nor return what we stole.
Can we escape if skin does not break skin,
if we kick down the door but do not enter in?

I wrote this poem as a sort of fictionalized retelling of a darker time in my life. After becoming a Christian early in high school, the seduction of my culture did not immediately leave me. For several years I secretly nurtured the desire I had been trained to believe was the chief goal of any young man: to convince a girl to sleep with him. In order to maintain that desire, I compromised many of my newly forming religious beliefs. I am now convinced that such compromises are the heart of hypocrisy, the sin that Jesus so aggressively sought to expose and stamp out.
 
Given my eagerness to throw away any shred of sexual purity I had at the earliest excuse, I believe that God was gracious to me in my early years by limiting the scope of my opportunities. Nonetheless, as time went on, I found myself at greater distance from Jesus and my fantasies seemed closer; they seemed like real possibilities and the anticipation was intoxicating. But even as I made decisions to indulge these long held desires, I felt pestered by the Holy Spirit, as if he would not allow me the bliss of moral ignorance. I had become too Christian to enjoy sinning. Still, the mind does itself violence as it tries to justify its decisions. I would taste but not swallow, playing the technical virginity game that is so common among adolescent Christians torn between two masters.  At once fearful and ambitious, timid and violent I was, over all, selfish. 
 
Trained by lust and porn, my first sexual experiences with another person were impersonal and focused almost entirely upon the gratification of my own fantastic and unrealistic desires. This is why I brought in the image of the conquistadors. The heart mechanism that allowed them to depersonalize the thousands they murdered is similar to the mechanism that allowed me to depersonalize what should have been an intensely personal and intimate act. “We fire not at women or men or girls or boys but at the heathen flesh that holds our one desire.” Persons become flesh.
 

The final lines of the poem, composed as questions, are meant to have fairly obvious answers. They were intended to point out the absurdity of “technical virginity” and the dishonesty of those who attempt to use it to disguise impurity. I was certainly among the absurd. I had tried and failed to straddle the fence between the pleasures of holiness and the pleasures of sin and, in the end, I could enjoy neither. It has taken years for me to learn that Jesus alone can satisfy the root desires of my being. He has maintained this truth since before the world began, but I have spent my time stroking the surface when an ocean of depth is offered.

I stole the line “The glimmering creatures are full of lies” from Anne Sexton’s poem The Ballad of a Lonely Masturbator which is also featured on Moss Kingdom.

Submit a Comment