In All God’s Playgrounds Poem by isaac gracie

In an abyss of some description:
An adolescent – with a pencil – dressed as if for a funeral – observes all God’s playgrounds from behind a broken pair of rose-tinted glasses.

In a pub:
Aging men at the bar – with pregnant bellies and pints and torn packets of crisps – all spilling over the counter.
Aging women – with their exclusives – cliques at round tables with gossip and bottles upon empty bottles of sweet wine.
In a restaurant:
Young couples, in love – with intertwined fingers and limbs, gazing hopefully through vast windows unto the prospect of immortality in a dying night sky.
Cool cats – with “money” – no longer young but not yet old – drinking expensive, cheap wine and contemplating poetry and politics beyond their understanding.
In a club:
Frothy, thronging masses – with tucked erections and dangerous libidos – clinging to companionship and a dying youth.
Fresh-faced hipsters – with cheap alcohol, piercings and tightfitting jeans – looking for a fix – for euphoria in strangers’ pockets.
In a church:
Dead men in dresses – with bread and wine, Holy flesh and blood – preaching, preaching, preaching for a truth they could never truly know.
Women and children on their knees – with doctored faith – the meniality and inconsequence of their existence redeemed by the prospect of an eternity with god.

In All God’s Playgrounds:

In the train carriage
In the airport terminal
In my mother’s house
In my father’s house
In the garden of Eden
In the washed out freshman hall
In the hospital
Outside the hospital
In the car, at sunset, overlooking Los Angeles from the wings of an angel
In the abortion clinic four months later
In the dug-out, lived-in trenches of Kabul
In the howling and bloodied streets of Syria
In the bulging head of the Western World’s phallic posterity on a frosty morning in September while the prospect of a new millennia still captivated
In the Bible
In Paris
In Rome
In Noisy New York
In London
In Peaceful Pitshanger
In a lonely tenement holding at W51NR

In all God’s playgrounds:

There are those who have encountered the gloomy looming shade of mortality,
Who have lost their battle,
Who have won their battle,
Who are still fighting their battle…