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go home
A little loathing goes a long way, proclaims the civilized man.
But sometimes a little is not nearly enough.
This is not autobiographical.
I carry few gripes in the sack and no love for myself.
Describe the evening as cautious:
it creeps around me like a big black cat with yellow eyes.
“No one leave the fucking room,” the seneschal said,
his rotten apple face punctuated by obsidian eyes.
Suddenly uncertainty seeps into your viscera
and you argue fruitlessly for detente.
You daughter tells you not judge her
or her friends who smell like fresh-baked bread.
Does that make a difference? Their wholesomeness?
Shake your head if you could not care less.
The contour of an ear is amazing.
I can stare at one for hours and say nothing.
Let me be frank. I waved the malign cleaver as a joke.
I never meant to frighten anyone.
And for this reason I am leaving the house.
Don't tell me to stay. My threat of parting must be formalized.
The earth is so large and yet not at all,
in its context. Look up and feel the ache.
Praying to something up there, out there
fails to compel.
So vast it is, where do you aim your prayers?
So strange, when you think.
A remnant of old modeling—
the shell of shouldered guilt.
Make way through fears
without pulpit echoes heating your neck.
Remember the cool of the pews,
throbbing votary candles, whispers.
O heart, O bleeding heart, O aching heart!
All about the heart exposed, wrapped in thorns.
It was all theatre and incense,
a mystery play, a costume drama, Romanesque kabuki.
Good stories until they were boring.
Made the world small and horrifying.
We live here, we are here, we are loved—
gently guided through the cosmos.
Otherwise we'd lose our minds and lose
our reason for being here which is to look.
Look at that, look at all of that. Isn't it—
Is it not worthy of a god?
And maybe you're a kind of god, as well.
Wherever you turn your gaze, a world is created.