This, is my favorite of all the poems I wrote in the years 2005 - 2013
A Primer on Finding God in the Details
I camp in the tree
outside your window and shave with broken glass so that you wont hear
the ants eating their way out through my skin. I want to apologize to my
blood. It isn't the blood's fault that it keeps me alive. In fact, if
my blood had any choice in the matter I am certain that it would flee my
body and go live in a Golden Retriever on a farm somewhere. Through the
window I watch you undress. Your body is too small for your size and I
want to gut you, hollow you out and live inside your hollowed out body.
Someday I will give up on this. For now I will watch you sleep and think
about dismantling your eyes.
Listen
to Elliot Smith and think about how stars die alone in the vacuum of
space. They must get terribly sad . Imagine their pleas to no one and
find that you are well on your way to believing in nothing. Western
literature has primed you for nihilism. Mort de Credit . You strip naked
and walk along a wire made of walrus entrails and use an umbrella to
balance. Below you is a flaming lake of dying stars.
I
decamp from your tree and move to Tupelo where the news tells of a
Rhinoceros escaped from the zoo terrifying the poorer residents of the
town's outskirts communities where they live in mud huts and shotgun
shacks. To feel clean, even, straight, I shave my head and get a tattoo
that says "There is No Magic" across my forearm. The tattoo artist has a
lisp and almost misspells my ink. I want to gut him and hollow him out
and live inside his body drinking cheap whisky all day. Instead I look
for a job sweeping up after eyeless men in a bar downtown. It is my job
to maintain the dank. It's a decorating choice.
You
will find yourself looking out your window, naked and not hollowed out,
searching your tree for my shape, which is your shape with more meat,
and wishing that I was still there. Fuck you, though. I've moved on.
I
collect snakes and carnival glass and green stamps and dream of a day
when I will be able to forget your broken, bruised, small frame. On the
street a man with squid tentacles in place of his face asks me for a
dollar to buy a drink and I give him the razor blades from my pocket.
Every night, alone in my apartment drinking Four Roses I call the Eff
Bee Eye and confess to being the Zodiac killer. This despite the fact
that Zodiac started killing four years before I was born and despite the
fact that I have never seen San Francisco. They want to believe me.
Everyone
needs something to believe in. Even dying stars must think of something
greater than themselves as they collapse into singularity. They can
take solace in knowing that their mass will curve space-time and draw a
colloquy of matter to its end. The crows understand this instinctively.
I deserve a little more.
I
am trash, but even trash needs to be wanted or loved. We discard it to
the politic worm and the men who will siphon methane to power factories
that make the machineries of death. Like the stars, your used cup from
Starbucks deserves the belief that it serves a higher purpose. Maybe
enough Starbucks cups could warp space-time and pull us all into
oblivion.
Maybe we would mistake all those discarded cups for God.
