the moral why ground

So now you are an armchair philosopher!
Throw you Plato’s Meno at the crux of midlife
and you feel so very grown up!
Gunslinging ethics and virtue, Aristotle –
concepts you really just do not understand.
Now that you see life in those neat capital lettters -
congratulate yourself’! How very Good you’re being!
This is a C+ paper turned in by a college freshman
sophomoric, barely passable –
some rote understanding of the basics –
but no comprehension of life’s grey corner’s, murkier waters.
Such thorny issues; they simmer  on the true philosopher’s tongue.
You and your trite interpretation of life’s complexities – it vexes
These are the stuff of the real logician’s proof.
You and your catholic values – anodyne to this or any situation really.
Your grade school Good Book which like a board walk gypsy
fortune-telling machine spits out the answers for a quarter tithe.
You abide by trite numbers – don’t think; trust integers! Moses!
A whipped dog fearing the ‘What if…’
You, living with the school-yard bully and ain’t she a bruiser –
She’ll keep your self-martyred ass in-line.
These days you find virtue behind a stone cold altar
Why it’s not even your faith.
I’m the WASP – and don’t I sting…
This new foreign, exotic, Episcopal like me –
seeped in incense and ritual, pale communion
    instant absolution!
The thurifer passes; swings her golden orb of incense
scenting the cloth of her cassock, the breath of your prayer.
She rattles hard the chains as you kneel,
swings back and forth a streamer of scented smoke,
a hypnotic pendulum you just can’t help but follow
    interloper, interloper
The scent of your hope lingers,
your only evidence of this exchange
the coals she extinguishes in the sacristy
    frankincense and myhrr
You and your moral why ground washed out.