Overkill #9 - Original Poetry by Dave Valentine, '10

Vatican City: Monday, December 22, 2008

He says, today,

that I am a destruction

and that I will bring mankind to damnation,

and that the eradication of me trumps saving our rainforests,

and that I am a deviation, an irregularity, a wound.

But, I say, today,

that I am a work of God just like him,

and that my heart beats the same as his,

and that my body breathes in time with his,

and that when he hurts me, I fall down too,

and that my scars linger just as his do,

and that what he asks of me is to stop being human,

and that his laws tell him to love thy neighbor,

and that I am a neighbor to him, and so I love him,

and that I can love more truly than any man who teaches to hate,

and that I know this because I have felt it,

and although I am hated because of him,

and am told not to feel and to cast away

everything that makes me real, I will continue

to be, because anything else would be a lie,

and hasn't he said, even today, that lying is evil, too?