Drawing heavily on my dysfunctional relationship with organized religion, the following series of poems represent decades of repressed personal feelings as well as the collective laments of countless critics before me. I endeavor to call out hypocrisy, shed light on logical fallacies and provoke a visceral response from those that have stopped questioning and challenging the dogmatic. This epistemological assessment is brutal in its frankness, unrelenting in its fervor, and the ultimate safe port for any wayward heretic on their own voyage of discovery.
Part 1: The Book of Genocide
In the beginning, there was nothing
With nobody around to behold
The absolute absence of something
Before time had a chance to unfold
Then suddenly, there was everything
Every moment unspooled in a blink
Atoms to Adam, chaos to king
Learn to kill before learning to think
From hunted to hunter-gatherer
Agrarian to industrial
An unrelenting seed scatterer
The virtuous turned to vitriol
And somewhere amidst all this turmoil
We sought to make sense of the unknown
Bringing legend and folklore to boil
Distilling truth from all we have sown
Over time we’d gather every verse
String together vague significance
Sprinkle the divine with the perverse
No one would notice the difference
Bundle it up, sell it for profit
The word of the one true creator
Interpreted by any prophet
Handed down by every dictator
“In the name of the Lord, I slay thee”
Murder by some divine providence
Make sure all the infidels can see
This execution of common sense
One by one, they’ll all be winnowed out
Until none but the faithful remain
Let perish the fools that dare to doubt
The almighty and his sovereign reign
The contradictions notwithstanding
Legions gleefully took up the cause
Their addled minds never demanding
Any answer to these fatal flaws
Anesthetized by the dogmatic
Piloted with a blind conviction
Their followers ignored the static
Feeding fuel into the fiction
Ultimately all meaning is lost
Buried beneath agnostic ashes
Condemnation comes with little cost
Religion consumes all that gnashes
“Civilization” sprung from a field
Sown with blood and bones of the cynic
The fate of the heretic now sealed
Martyrs transcend into the mystic
The years indifferently unwind
Yet still the bodies of the aggrieved
Accumulate the sins of mankind
For all those that have never believed
And though all these wars have been dispersed
Spread out over the eons of time
Forgotten tales of the accursed
Dissolve bleakly into the sublime
…continued…
Mannino Acid 