The Religious Education Teacher Incarnate & Borderlines

By Lucius Falkland

Featured in New Lyre Magazine’s forthcoming Summer 2024 issue.

The Religious Education Teacher Incarnate

A part of you is still in Year Eleven
Where all that adult mess remained ahead
And your RE teacher taught you about Heaven
While you longed to be undressed within his bed.

The Buddha was the one he really rated.
He tickled his excitement, so yours too,
And in me, you felt your darling incarnated,
Except, unlike him, I fell in love with you.

You took me to your world, a beach at twilight,
Where I’d rescue you from everything that’s bad,
From that infant mite left crying while her parents fight.
Like your teacher, I’d be the brilliant side of Dad:

I wouldn’t, like a child, burn and blister
And shout that you are useless, shit and vile.
I wouldn’t slap your mother, smack your sister,
Break the door down and then promptly reconcile.

With me there’d be Dad’s temper (Maybe . . .  sorta),
The cutting wit; though always a good lark.
But often you’d become that frightened daughter
In a sudden trance, and I’d be all that’s dark.

I’d feel in the dark myself, a child neglected
By unfit parents, to choke and sob and hurl.
I must end it, but by the virus I’m infected
That I’m abandoning a tiny, little girl. 

Borderlines

Splitting atoms of love, not uranium,
And bombing me, not Japan,
Would probably reasonably summarise
What you did to this middle-aged man,
You were a worshipper; not just a fan.

You appeared as his spiritual double
(In Heaven, not in the abyss):
A much younger girl (with a boyfriend)
Put her slender leg across his
And inquired, “Please can we kiss?”

After seventeen months of adultery
We lay in a bath by the sea,
That evening had been as tempestuous,
You’d briefly stopped doting on me
Over nothing, a spilt cup of tea,

Or a faux pas that mattered as little.
In a trance, a new zoomer was born
Hating God with the vengeance of Belial
And scourging me with her scorn,
As though something within you was torn.

Devoted again in that bathtub,
Whatever was ripped was re-sown:
You’d burnt yourself some years prior.
You were maddened by being alone.
You adopted a childlike tone:

Dad was “physical with me,” you noted;
Slapped your mum when she punctured his pride,
Lay into your sister, and chased you,
You rang the police, hid and cried.
“You’re a tell-tale!” Mum said; took his side.

That night, once more, the Other emerged
To proclaim that the whole world was cursed
And she must survive in all ways she could. . .
Of suitable wives, they are the inverse,
But, dear Christ, they inspire some verse.

Lucius Falkland is the nom de plume of an academic and writer originally from London.