poem

 Theodicy

Justice is for the earth. It loses its power in the scale of the eternal. As for right and wrong, it’s either now or never. This tiny sliver of human existence swaddled on both sides by an infinite darkness may have been filled with myriad unredeemed instances of inscrutable incommensurability and sadness and suffering and loss but in the grand scheme of things what does it matter? Anything divided by infinity approaches zero. Its light grows more and more indistinct. A tiny speck in the night sky, many light years away. You’ve moved on to the moon, who never complains. In the afterlife anything can happen, an infinite number of times. The guy in Ohio who ripped you off, fucked your wife and left you for dead? What happens when he’s in heaven too? Somebody whispers, maybe this is actually hell. Which means justice, in a way, prevails. But that doesn’t seem right, you say. Eternal punishment for the way I lived my short miserable life? That’s not fair!  You shake your fist at the heavens. This scene plays out over and over for a million years until one day you decide you don’t care. Or that no one is listening. You can’t even remember what you were so mad about. Heaven becomes a place where you are surrounded by strangers you’ve never wronged. Everyone here feels the same way about you. In the meantime you have to live until you’re dead. Yes, it's all based on nothing. Yes, it’s all made up. Yes, it’s a vast collective fiction. But here you are. Too fearful to do anything about it. Too proud to be like all the others. A Christ rejected by your generation’s Grand Inquisitor. Other than one or two like you, all that’s left are the masses of stupid true believers and the self-selected few, the cold blooded killers who see the opportunity that arises in the void of pointlessness. They write the rules and reap the benefits and everyone plays along. And so a long period of avoidable suffering ensues. The weak get exploited. The faithful are thwarted. The hopeful get so tired they decide to wake up.

3/27/25