A Reaffirmation that I am not the Messiah.

no one's ever taken pictures of me
that I've ever truly been proud of
and deep in the heart, there's a hint
I've given to myself that I've never
done anything of which of a picture would be deserving,
all these near-misses, these second guesses,
thirty-three years and I'm reminded
of this man they call messiah, wonderer, god-hero,
who broke on the scene like the rolling stones,
chanting sermons and weaving strange tales
that made the magistrates wonder about their
foothold on the social order, all in a matter
of years, so the book says, eloquently,
and their fear of the cracks it spread
among the poor & the wounded had them
guessing the only way to shut off this flow
was to kll him somehow, maybe nail him to a board
on a hill, outside the skirts of a town,
while others watched, as a lesson to anyone
who was looking to raise the dead or flagging spirits.
To go forth gently into that mad science, you would
have to be a lunatic or convinced of your power,
not yielding to the cost, to the humiliation beset you,
not cowering in the wake of personal misery, this trudging
in the midst of possible failure, admirable
but seemingly stupid, & yet calling to mind something like envy.
They never knew about the permanence of a photograph,
a visual log that there was anyone here like you,
of you smiling or staring into the face of your persecutors,
I fought you, that picture says, and maybe you won,
but your victory is a spoil of the war raging
between humans, for the spirit of standing up,
that he could say I fought you, but I lived still as I did,
among you, in spite of you while I did. I withstood
the revolution of the heart, and there was nothing
to capture me in a magazine, doing remarkable things,
nothing like the nightly news, or a muffled cry
from behind a lens, urging on your ancestors from
a mystic void, hidden in a strange dark cavern
the only shelter from a desert of exile.
Sometimes this wilderness seems like something you seek,
but if you play it right, you're never in the wilderness,
or maybe it's just that I've not fought for this,
and I'm nothing like that man, who they say fought
his demons for forty days, because I'd not shown any
sign of staging coupe from any point, I'm not the photograph,
nowhere near possessed of the cannonball locked in my heart,
not even straining one moment to sling any arrows
except the arrows that already pierce the heart,
the age of our years should matter little, but what
we do with failure before it encompasses us with doubt,
over the question of how we've lived, wither its impact,
wither we've justified the hours spent in sun,
or that our skin was touched by humilty or dignity,
wther we contributed to a celebration of what happens
when we at last take on the glory of living in this skin.