The Destructive Disease of the Soul

An Autobiographical Narrative: 1980s
                                                             
Both The Destructive Disease of the Soul
And The Compensatory Man Par Excellence
Possess as their starting points
A novel written at an estimate around 1987,
With one Francis Phoenix as chief protagonist.
                                                             
Its fate remains a mystery,
But it may well be it was completed,
Only to be purged soon after
I became a born again Christian in 1993,
With only a handful of scraps remaining.
                                                             
The versified pieces below
Were forged out of these scraps
In September 2011, although initially,
They'd taken shape as prose pieces,
Only to be edited and versified at a later date.
                                                             
The Destructive Disease of the Soul
                                                             
No amount of thought
Could negate
Suffering in the mind
Of Francis Phoenix.
                                                             
That much he had always believed,
That humanity is a sad, lost
And suffering race. 
Sometimes he felt it so strongly
That the worship of a Saviour seemed
To be the only sane act on earth,
And then it passed.
 
It was not increasing callousness,
But an increase in the number of moments
He felt quite intoxicated with compassion
That had soured Frank's outlook.
                                                             
During those moments, he wept
For all those he'd ever been cruel to.
He could be so hard on people,
So terribly hard.
To whom could he ask forgiveness?
                                                             
It was his sensitivity
That bred those moments of Christlike love,
When he cared so little for himself,
For his body, even for his soul
When it was the soul of his father,
The soul of his mother,
The souls of his friends and relatives
And everyone he'd ever known
That he cared about.
                                                             
That was truth, that was reality,
That was the purpose of all human life,
That love, that benevolence,
That absolute forgiveness. 
Otherworldly love is painful,
But it is the only true freedom known to Man.
Too much thought eventually produces the conviction
That nothing is worth doing.
Thought is a destructive disease of the soul.