Laughter

You laugh and my gut churns. 

I cringe before your mockery.

Your ridicule cuts deep, 

severing the bonds of breath and life.

Your careless disrespect is more than I can bear.

I desire your love: the bloody business of your heart

but all you care to offer me is bile.

I need your affirmation and regard

but you would rather me revile.

Satan laughs and darkness churns,

the world lies in dismay.

His despite rings through all the halls of men;

greed and hate and soft conceit:

the comedy of error and of ill

which he does pen and close direct,

with force of iron will.

This vale of tears for us is his dire cauldron vast,

where he does compound fell

and noisome brews, his pain to sooth at last.

God laughs at the plight of men:

the sorrow and betrayal,

the sickness and the pain,

the hardships and travail.

God laughs, not with mirth, but from sympathy:

not that God can know our woe

in His Eternal Being;

but that He’s ever present in our sorrow

and absurdity.

In that laugh God exceeds Himself

and falls for man from Heaven to Earth,

becoming one with us

and taking up the very comic role

which you and I and all our kin play out

and that had first brought forth His laugh.

We laugh and hate is spent

error and pain are overcome.

The wounds we have inflicted close

and healing can begin.

Now grappling can become a form of play,

not strife,

and all our wanton ways

be shown in purest light.

Laughter frees us from our sin

and all that locks us in,

binding us with false wisdom

and denying our necessary freedom.

I laugh and the whole Universe stands still,

the absurdity of life bounds forth

and will not rest until its sympathetic force

is spent. Empathy moves my bowels.

My heart is pulled towards the trials

and sufferings of my fellow men. Perforce,

I must else laugh or yet weep copious tears

of bitter, stinging woe: so I do choose to laugh.