I stood before you
Pleading my case into the offended silence
Assuming no able mediator
Would intervene in the violence,
The waste, the butchery,
And the endless consumption
Framing my identity and
Crippling my function
But the unthinkable happened, as I unraveled
Spilling confession where I noxiously sinned
The Judge handed me the very same gavel
With which I should have been condemned-
Mine to beat upon you, and the past,
To damn, or to set down free.
On it, engravings of our trespasses:
Killing you was killing me
And how deeply I considered it
With no one left to save-
Allowing my embitterment
To seal our ashes together in the grave
But what would be left behind
If I razed our souls to damnation?
We would both produce in like kind
The offspring of condemnation.
And the Great Judge pointed to a battered face
Hanging bloodied on an unearned cross
His wheezing body dripping grace
On the gnashing teeth of the lost.
I set the gavel down.
Where is the path forward?
What kind of future can be found,
Or excavated, or forged
After all these crimes between us?
My demon is my brother is my priest
And it is treasonous
To refuse your release.

So I release you,
But not to freedom.

We, neither of us, move autonomously
Outside the constraints of our pardons
We must not live dishonestly,
Sowing what separates and hardens
But pursue good, each for the other.
I sought you once, for help getting me through
The tragedies in each collision of breath
But you instead became the catalyst that got me to
A reality higher than death
And I am grateful for your diversion,
Your oppression and extortion,
Because in your exclusion and aspersions
I found that, in Him, I am more than

A Conqueror,
And so are you.

We are blood, and able to stop shedding it
Putting down the blades of our desires and expectations,
What we’ve been revering or regretting
Before cutting into the next generation
The same slavers’ irons
That have clapped us both in chains
Don’t you likewise yearn
For freedom to change?
And you are free
From the past, from your sins
I release you;
Go and make your amends
By sinning no more
Become the man you were created to be:
Serve the least, stand for
We who cannot be heard, the weak
Lost under the grumbles.
Walk in bare feet, be true:
Stand in honesty, humbled,
And I will stand for you.

A companion piece to:

The Defendant Rises