waking with nightmares
by Matthew E. Henry
perhaps Chesterton was right and there does come a time when the act,
the game, the art of pretending becomes tiresome. when playing cops and
klansman—the cross burning, the neck crushing—loses its luster.
a time when the child of innocence—the virgin, the fledgling, the novice—
is buried beneath the silt and soil of experience without further pleasure.
when the forbidden becomes quotidian—the illicit listless—and we seek
new ways to peel fur and flesh from mewing cats, to slowly pluck
the dusty scales from butterflies with heated tweezers. a time when
civilization turns to routine brutality and the mythology of being better
than those called savage is finally abandoned: the tree-maiden is ravaged,
the moon enslaved as muse, the belly of the earth split to birth the means
of all our drug-taking and dram-drinking. and then we increase the dose,
not until feeling can’t be felt, but until there is a new feeling, a new
desire to be sated. we seek stranger sins—more startling obscenities—
to stimulate senses gone soft. we become like the prophets of Baal,
slicing our skin with bronze knives, crying for divinity to appear
from a country far and away or simply taking a shit in bushes nearby.
and when met with the ubiquitous silence—no matter how common
or expected—we scream into the abyss until convinced
our echoes are a benevolent god
calling us just.
After a section of G.K. Chesterton’s The Everlasting Man
Matthew E. Henry (MEH) is an educator, essayist, occasional fiction writer, and author of seven poetry collections, most recently Promises to Keep (Wayfarer Books, 2026). Editor-in-chief of The Weight Journal, a poetry editor at American Poetry Journal, and creative nonfiction editor at Porcupine Literary, MEH’s publications include Anglican Theological Review, Massachusetts Review, Mom Egg Review, The Pedestal Magazine, Ploughshares, Stone Circle Review, Terrain, Vita Poetica, and The Worcester Review. MEH earned an MFA yet continued to spend money he didn’t have completing an MA in theology and a PhD in education. He writes about education, race, religion, and burning oppressive systems to the ground at www.MEHPoeting.com.
