The Plight of Raising a Child

Is it by moral deficit,

a sad deficiency of my humanity

or by a more desirable quality

that I find myself explaining the bare bones of death

to my two year old son

in terms of truth

and not by means of overladen 

and subsequently meaningless metaphors.

I can not spill words of heaven

over his pliable mind

like the ridiculousness of holy water

or two pieces of wood glued together

to ward off evil- an abstraction 

ironically, hysterically 

maddeningly! man made-

like daylight savings time and monsters and morality.

There will be no delusions 

of an uncharted utopian realm 

too far to reach (sans effervescent wings)

which awaits the sinless (a word begging ridicule)

as if the dead are noble ambassadors of the living

and not in fact mounds of expired matter to be burned,

to gouge the land with long boxes full off nothing

but vain sentiment. 

I find comfort in finality

closure

death is the end

and all other explanations

are absurdly

imaginative.