The Third Poem from Jason Ryan Morton’s Book, ‘Diverging Paths’

Here’s another poem from Jason Ryan Morton’s collection of poetry and prose, Diverging Paths. As anyone who has read my blog posts knows, I’ve written about my Facebook friend’s poetry many times. Again, I’ve set his writing in italics to distinguish it from mine. Here’s the poem:

I hate it all, 
Can I watch it die, 
Fading embers, 
Of a burning sky, 
Call me, 
To be nothing but what I am, 

Every fucking day is the same, 
Breaking me apart, 
Too dark to start, 
Can’t hit the Wall, 
break the design, a
pattern of time, 
Is unheard and underlying, 
Maladies return me to the death of my humanity, 

O Lord I am broken, 
My soul tattered and shattered, 

Too a point nothing fucking matters, 
And all the dreams are lies, I kiss
my Deliverance goodbye, And yet
it seems, 

I am me, 
But broken, 
Where no vessel should be, 
I am nothing, I …. 

Will not bother, I….. Will not bow, 
I….. 
Will not scrape, 

I am nothing, 
But at least I’m me,

And now for my analysis.

The poet would “watch it die,” the “Fading embers/Of a burning sky,” that “Call [him],”… He seems to be referring to the religious authority represented by God in the sky, which is “burning” because the validity of that authority is “fading”. Having been abused by it, he would happily “watch it die.”

In “Every fucking day is the same,” the use of the word fucking doesn’t seem to be just gratuitous swearing. I’ve learned from his life that he was a victim of sexual abuse, something kids often suffer in Catholic institutions, for which the perpetrators all too often go unpunished. Feeling the effects of the trauma is an every day thing, hence “Maladies return [him] to the death of [his] humanity.”

The poet calls out to God for help, “O Lord I am broken,” but that God isn’t there to help him, because here God is just the idol of institutionalized religion, rather than representative of any genuine spirituality…”all the dreams are lies.”

“Too a point nothing fucking matters” should be seen as a pun on too and to. Nothing matters to a point, but his problem is, too, a point, the point of the rapist’s phallus. Again, fucking isn’t gratuitous swearing. He kisses his “Deliverance” goodbye, because there is no deliverance, yet the capitalized D implies an allusion to the film and novel featuring the rape of a man. The deliverance of the Church, resulting all too often in the sexual abuse of children, is mere deliverance into another kind of hell.

He is broken, so he calls himself nothing, since part of the trauma he feels makes him devalue himself. In spite of his pain, though, there is some defiance against his abusers. He “will not bow,” and “will not scrape.” Society devalues him, yet “at least” he’s sincerely himself, not the kind of phoney person that society favours.

The aligning of the first half of the text to the right, where the focus is on the cause of his suffering, versus the aligning of the second half of the text to the left, mostly his reaction to his suffering, as well as his defiance to it, suggests the right-wing authoritarianism of the Church versus his left-wing aspiration to be liberated from such authority.