Seven Deadly Sins

I don’t have a home anymore

It was built for a different purpose

Than to stay inside

Too big to handle

So many affairs

Arduously fighting

With the widest man in town

My dad

Gobbling his ego

With unhealthy food and drink

Smoking and swearing at the same time

And then pretending nothing happened

As the bricks he has laid

Are still strong and stable

Yet that not worries me

Just a fact

That at the same time

My mum prays for this very sin

A Gluttony

Nobody is honest there

Sweeping all hypocrisy

Under the golden carpet

Made of Wrath, Envy, and Pride

In accomplishments useless to anyone

Yet still passed on

To children

Two daughters fighting in opposite camps

Of Avarice

In social or material form

Not alien to both

Whilst the nature of the male progenitor

Descended to Sloth

Denying

The female part

Being used in every way

Yet not protesting against her fate

Locked in another shape

Of religion

Being the most distant for me

Even if I was born in it

I don’t understand duality and Lust

In a priest from my town

Having children and a wife

Should it be like that?

Catholic servant celibacy

Or is this a joke everyone believes?

I’m not there anyway

I could not remain in shadowy shame

Of my former form

Going nowhere

In the corpse-strewn streets

Of my childhood abandoned forever

Reinvented in my many dreams

As if I were stuck there ceaselessly

*

September 2021

*

* An allegorical image depicting the human heart subject to the seven deadly sins, each represented by an animal (clockwise: toad = avarice; snake = envy; lion = wrath; snail = sloth; pig = gluttony; goat = lust; peacock = pride).

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