Not The Way To Heaven

Not The Way To Heaven
© Surazeus
2024 11 03

While trudging nowhere on the way to Heaven, 
I stop into the old brick downtown church 
where the frail naked man covered with wounds 
asks with gravelly voice for a cigarette, 
so we smoke a while in the silver dawn, 
contemplating mysteries of life and death. 

When I stand and zip up my tattered coat, 
he waves nonchalantly with snarky grin, 
and bids me safe travels on road of life, 
so I salute him with casual diffidence, 
then try to escape adverse circumstance 
that traps me in cycle of poverty. 

Against adversity of ancient rules, 
that force me to stay on strict career paths 
predefined for me by society, 
I trudge with numb indifference of hope, 
inspired by how our world savior survived 
through nonviolent resistance to evil. 

Soft evening breeze of desert ambience 
swirls my hair gently around my blurred eyes 
as I trudge the highway where devils dance 
from El Paso to San Antonio, 
while helicopters chase brave immigrants 
who try to invade the Garden of Eden. 

Leaning against elegant pine of faith 
somewhere on the highway in Arizona 
on the way from Flagstaff to Albuquerque, 
I watch the eagle glide in the blue sky 
and ask her if she knows the way to Heaven, 
but she knows the way to Elysium. 

Regressing backward on the way to Heaven, 
without the wings of Icarus to fly straight, 
I wake by the highway in Oregon 
somewhere between Portland and San Francisco, 
talking to the mountain ghost of lost faith 
who points the way home to the Promised Land. 

Staring at my face in the pool of tears 
near the Sawtooth Mountains in Idaho, 
I ask the angel with ten thousand eyes 
why I remember my ancestral lives 
more than one million years into the future, 
so she gives me glass of cider to drink. 

While we are walking hand in hand at dawn, 
my wife, whose crystal skeleton glows blue 
with sorrow of humanity, explains 
to me, though this is not the way to Heaven, 
this is the way to the Valley of Trees 
where we can build our own new paradise.