Without Words

Before the body was made
latent, dishonest in its efforts
to be seen, touched, held...

Before the body became
a conspirator, a thief...

In those days,
before the barbarian tongue--
the hungry language--
distorted with tortured meanings,
and told the inadvertent lies
of a limited vocabulary,
I was the understudy
to my emotions, a tremulous mass.
The infantile urgency
of multiplying cells, the elegant
mitosis made of gold
or mercury, the silver skin
in wordless shivers
and soundless sobs.

What does the baby dream of?
There in his cage,
he wakes to a world
of watercolor blurs.
The vague feeling
of uncertainty, or loss,
or mere frustrated desire
will overwhelm him.

He is alone
and must get used to it.

Good God

Theirs was a sensible God.  Not bogged down with miracles.  Not requiring prayers.

Ash Wednesday

The dancing sands

of this vast desert

have found their way

inside.  Beneath
the salted slug

of this parched tongue,
there lies  the dust.
                                Some dried wafer,

some bitter pill,

is crumbling. 

There is no word

for this, no curl of lips

nor burst of air.  The wax

of your expression, the smile--
its arrogant silence--
is melting.

There is heat

in faith and zealotry,
a fire that has taken
all that is combustible
(and stolen
all of the oxygen 

out of the room).

What ruins are these

smoldering?  Perhaps 

some prayers are carried 

on the thinning evidence

of smoke.  And so...

This calloused thumb

would rub the sleep

from your third eye

or dry its tears with certainty,
the winter blindness.

The satisfaction spread

in marking meets 

the beauty extracted 

from a target by the aim.

The wild palms are apprehensive

when called upon to applaud.  

Lifelines and lovelines 

are untangled into maps 

that might lead nowhere.  That might

make for better incense 

than for shade.

Slippage

Crafted more out of some burnished expectations from another place and circumstance than out of the slightest commitment to the threatened truths variously competing to be the metamemes to underpin our future, the individually articulated theologies of the fundamentalist right forgo the traditions of tolerance and respect--indeed, of love--in favor of divisive judgment.  Such a position is typical of a simplistic world view.  And unfortunately--digestible by the emotions of the id--these are self-perpetuating, rapidly expanding perspectives.  They are the weeds of philosophy crowding out and supplanting calm reason in favor of the contentious superiority of their heretical hatred. 

By seeing their conversion and their faith as evidence of their special relationship with the divine--their blessedness--the true believers are able to justify and rationalize their own behavior while stridently condemning that of those they perceive to be outside of the covenant.  These believers define the parameters of their community to the exclusion of others so as to emphasize their own exceptionalism.  Among the elect, they are above criticism;  they see their purpose as higher giving them broad authority in both private and public spheres. 

In fairness, while focused on Christian fundamentalism, this assemblage of words could just as easily call out Islam, NeoPaganism, or Atheism.  While the hypocritical abandonment of the most basic tenets of Jesus' ministry makes evangelical Christian dogma a special case, the alignment of any one of these belief systems with arrogance, defensiveness, and certainty make them all subject to this malady.  Without curiosity and humility, we lose both humanity and empathy.  This narrowing of the gaze, while not without a kind of protective comfort, skews one's vision of the world.  It shrinks not only who we allow others to be but also who we are capable of being.  The invention of "meaning" and the confidence that comes with an individual's subscription to some personally extracted version of belief gives foothold to "difference", and thus to division and hate.

The People Before: Rosary

It seemed like you
were always negotiating
with God, small prayers
invented,
repeated, 
repented,
a way of counting,
(some kind of rosary),
a way of breathing out
the multiplicity of frustrations--
your husband,
your children,
the monotony of your love--
your fears
that could devour you.

On Sundays,
Father offered nothing,
but rhythm and incense
rising
up
into the dark cavern,
a numbing drone.
These lessons rehearsed,
these lessons repeated--
abstraction and allegory--
did not speak
to the worries,
to the insomnia
complicated
by a child's fever,
a husband's silence,
a minister's frown.

The two youngest are fighting
again
on the far side
of their father's stoic stare,
their sister's squirming.
The bones in their bony butts
cut flesh
from the inside; the boys are
cursing the hardened surface
of the Earth,
and of the mahogany pew.

This was the battle
that concerned you,
not armies mounting,
a final reckoning,
between heaven 
and hell.

The Small God

They were clear in their intentions while denying their ambitions.  It is likely that--removed by "faith" from the rationale of their beliefs--they could not see the implications of their theology.  But they were tenacious in defending their position, the proverbial dog with a bone (growling) on the infant demanding with his tears and pounding fists to have the pacifier put back in place...

for the sake of softening their dreams and in zealous pursuit of simplicity, they all want to keep sucking on the sugar tit, the plug as it is sometimes called because the instantaneous quality of that gratification distracts from nuance and contradiction. 

The abandonment of logic for feeling is just as instinctual and "human" as the infantile urge to suck, to find the source of milk and solace and drain it til its dry.  Similarly, the other tenets of the creed conspire to continue this willful limiting of God:  a preference for mythology over history, a denial of geology and genetics, a quiet terror of quantum physics and a grotesque attachment to the (welcome) limitations of a 6000 year calendar.

One can imagine that God is wholely indifferent to the strictures of the box.  That which contains ideas of Him/Her does not actually define Her/Him (except of course for the helots and  zealots who ascribe to this particular delusion of the divine).  And one truly committed to the grandeur, the great contradictions and the grace discovered in their resolution--wants more than anything to allow the divine to be full, and large, and infinite.  This observer, far from being arrogant or even certain, sits in the shadow of God with appropriate awe and patience.  Overwhelmed by Her/His expanse and totality, this supplicant's every breath is a humble prayer.

On the other hand, those who prefer to worship at the box appear compelled (by their discomfort with things they can not easily understand, digest or integrate?) to re-create a God in their own claustrophobic self-image.  They make no room for metaphor.  They make no effort for subtlety.  Their conception of God is designed to be small enough to feed from their own empty breasts, to sit at their own supper table.  He is arrogant enough to scrap with their enemies in petty demonstrations of machismo, to confirm their prejudices while approving of their materialism.  

And it could be argued that this materialism itself is the source of their ardent simplification of things.  Muddled by the mysteries of the spirit, these believers hunger for something more concrete:  They want a planet shaped over a weekend as if God were doing yard work.  They want a race that's identity is not made slippery by even the most obvious mechanism of change.  They want a book that subdues possibility, narrows their ability to think.  They crave a small god--an infant in the manger--cute enough to love but small enough to drown in the bathtub, should it become necessary.

Beware of those who traffic in rumors of villainy.  Their world is too simplistic to contain you.  This fact will be reason enough for them to debase your name in accusations.  They will do so first with laughter.  If this does not destroy your reputation, they will do so with their tears.  The world is crowded with stories of such coordinated infamy, history, mythology, fairy tale.  Good guys and bad guys have long battled over the heart of the world.  But a good man's integrity is determined by tests that he has never had to take; and a bad man's sins would be nothing within the revelations of another religion.  Those who cannot see nuance in others refuse to see contradiction in themselves.  The tenacity of this delusion affords them the luxury of hating without confessing the toxicity of hate.  In a dualistic paradigm, blame is an external that excuses them of their motivations.  If one believes in the devil, it is no longer necessary to look for humanity; the moral dilemmas assembled by real world feelings and circumstances are eclipsed by evil as a force.  And where evil is a force, the subtleties of human experience no longer matter. To the pawns in this dishonestly designed battle, their affiliation with the just cause (and both sides see themselves as warriors in the army of God) is a kind of fortunate accident that disguises the intrinsic egoism if not out right arrogance of their convictions.  In actuality, their is a fundamental cowardice in their facile world view.  The challenge of these real-world complications undermines their happiness by introducing ambiguity into action and word.

Church Windows

Seven swords of light
the pulse,
(pulse, pulse) as the bellows
swell and sigh.  Seven shades--
the faded stained glass--mixing
with the dust passing
in (and out) of the illuminations.

Sunday morning
is torn by the trumpets.
Church windows
shatter.
Unbreakable
triptych. 

There are
seven sacred mysteries,
a trinity unhinged.  At night,
no fire in the eyes,
the windows turn
to ice, black ice
with cracks sutured with hammered lead,
the fleeting fix
to an imperishable problem.

Hot Air and Cold Lead(s)

As hard as I try--on hands and knees, or straddling some 21st century conveyance--I cannot mop up the viscous fluid, the slime trail of despair I leave behind...It is impossible; this pollution is my wake.  

I am the wacky automobile billowing black smoke as I am chased through monochrome streets with monochrome moods.  I choke the air with comic relief.  But half the crew has asthma and are excused from the set.  I wonder with witless sarcasm how it is that this delicate hyper-sensitivity is pandemic with young, spoiled starlets and Hollywood harlots while the extras (on the streets and in the cars) are immune to this plague and breathing freely at least until they pickup a paycheck.

"Where does your hostility to the workers originate?" she asks me, and I stare blankly.  She is a psychologist and it is apparent we are far beyond politics here.  She earnestly believes that there are markers of experience (perhaps trauma even) that have constellated in my memory to skew my opinions from the righteous and correct path of progressive thinking.  She stands by her science.  

Meanwhile, I have neither the energy to contest her point by point nor the manners that might help to succour the situation, the clenched teeth of a disingenuous smile, the gentle waves of salutatory praise moving from my lips and my eyes.  Her impatient ears.  She wants that:  "I was wrong."  That would mean so much to her.  And I could say it--with phonetic precision--and I could mean it.  

We were all wrong in that analysis.  Our politics and our theology are fragments, Dead Sea Scrolls,  the Rosetta Stone, the teeth and jaw of a giant camel or the adrenaline-infused staccato of these tracks of a crowded herd of miniature horses.  But all the measure and methodology does not make for truth.  One persuasive, self inflated, forked tongued, divinely inspired minister of the lord can erase the enlightenment and the renaissance in one arrogant sermon that will make us remember...

The dark ages live on in us...in a chamber with rusty lock...in the back of our superstitious minds...

Death in the Afternoon

The patience of a wildcat and the blood is more precious than oil. This element is burning carbon, lava oozing from his humped back, pouring over the obsidian of his coat. His song is a huff and a billow. The tilted head is curious. The gilded eye is furious, reflecting the sun and the hunger of the crowd. Loud cries lift the matador higher, give her the appetite to kill. There is blood. There is sand. And there is the staggering beast; it is us, drunk on this violence. Humanity sits just as comfortably in a bullring as in a cathedral. As long as sacrifice is demonstrated, as long as blood is spilled, there will be an audience, rapt in ritual and mythology.