In Crisis

  In Crisis

Lying here on this mattress I am staring up and at who with this gray ceiling and no curtain on the window.  The suburban forest is sprawling.  The rye grass tries to grow.  The soil is still intact.  A trillion stars and ours is exploding on China.  Eleven p.m. again, no hobbit dog and my daughter is at her mother’s.  These sheets insinuate stark-white despite the wrinkles.  Detergent is miraculous.  Nothing seems to change.

Where are you?  Questions are like hornets.  I am numb from stingers contemplating being done in faith that you even exist.  The mythologies, the trinities, the sacraments, the obscenities parade on a landing strip.  I feel bombarded in capsules of tin-pharmaceutical chug-down.  There is no medication to find solace, logic, or repose in those words.  Were you really ever here?  Why would you give a shit about us?

Primordial ooze for millions of years and complex life is a blip.  We are a single protozoa in an ocean of a universe.  We have this self-granted-grandeur imposed importance to allocate a human construct onto our genesis-engine to rationalize our purpose above that of every other life-form on a gel capsule of a planet.   I nakedly ask, “Did we create you rather than you us?”

Our bodies, our diseases, our fragilities, all of it staggers aghast at the dump-truck load of ordaining human life as randomness rather than to a master work of intelligent design bartering on Pascal’s wager.  The might as well times concede to faith like both a blanket to comfort ourselves and a pass-card from your wrath.

How do I come to peace with the dichotomy of literature promoting your mercy and vengeance in a duality of a line that says, “No matter what I do you will forgive me if I request it,” and “If I cross you will smote me into an eternal damnation in a netherworld hell to be tortured by your nemesis.”  Internally I acknowledge that you are more powerful than Oz.  Thus by your lack of action God, you must be complicit in allowing any vacation days in hell to occur. 

Are you a passive-aggressive fuck exhausted from flooding babies and families that drowned worse than Katrina casualties to save some Noah-drunk?  Tired of raining sulfur and stacking human salt-pillars and sending your only son to create a human battlement obsessed with the virginity of some semi-statutory rape case to flog and hang your kid on a tree in a really bad weekend to prove a point that you are a righteous Lord?

What the fuck God?  Couldn’t you just make a you-tube commercial or put one of these miracles that substantiate the actions of billions for generations in a communicated form more reliable than some dude wrote down what happened forty years later and we retell what we think the gist was and all of humanity is based and reliant on this oral history?  That is sadistic and wholly unnecessary given how easily it would be to call time out, and lay down the ground rules if you wished to intersect our paths.

What was the average intelligence of these mailmen to humanity herding goats in their side-jobs?  All these crumble-step languages of absent vowel Hebrew, Aramaic, Latin, Greek, German, English, Spanish; how do we even know these indisputable nouns and verbs even resemble the telephone game of what any one present ever heard if it ever occurred?  What about China, India, Peru?

But no, we are here committing genocides and murdering in your name to prove points that can not be proven.  We have a city in Italy prompting hard-line stances staunch with an escalation of commitment with a slipstream of criticism alienating people because the absentee landlord is letting the human constructs of sex, gender, race, orientation and wealth bastardize what was supposed to be Jesus’ message to begin with?  How much gold could be smelted in Vatican City?  How much of it was purchased on the backs of a tax break, slaves, or a crusade?

Catholic Church wealth war-lords banned lending from toilet-thrones for vigilante J.C.-assassin Jews to usurp Vatican-Christ’s usury laws.  Florentine first currency had a John-the-Baptist façade.  Interest, but let’s not say the world sodomized in bribe-contribution tributes spur the Renaissance to enrich the celibate Illuminati for Jesus in gilded statutes and blood-murals.  Kiss the golden-cock ring of murky wealth buried in dirt basements for Solomon judgment.  Banish unforgiving servants.  Parable of talents over buried wealth, God condemns our deficient internal rate of return to afford our divine retirement 401k.  Murk the blur into Schedule B itemized deductions. 

I am pissed that you are not here, that you will not give us some kind of hug; that I feel like I will live out this life here and die alone into nothingness.  Pascal’s wager has a down side.  It is the same as a loving soldier’s spouse spending the remainder of his days devoted to his assumed-fallen wife, only to discover her secret sins of infidelity, a second family and wrath on his own deathbed.  The assumptions of gender, the personal nature of unspoken faiths, they betray in the contrapuntal contraptions of Thomas and are cast like lots of bad seed for the crows.

I want to love you.  I want to believe in you.  Life is easier and more comfortable like that blanket believing that you exist.  It is more comfortable believing in a counterweight to atrocities and our individual pains.  I want to believe that Hitler and Gandhi have divergent eternities.  

I want to imagine our moral code is more than a social contract, but a down payment on our salvation.  The human yearning for justice in me gets giddy thinking about magical Christmas-land heaven.  As if in our lives we are purchasing a fragment of an amusement park ticket each day.  One Sunday we can have the whole document to pass the turnstile.  In heaven we can see Willy Wonka, Oz, and the Magic-Marker Jesus like a fulfilled social security nest-egg.

The trinity can perform in exalted glory on the seesaw of a human constructed justice to reward us with our missing limbs, refurbish our broken hearts and circumvent that damn freewill.  Freewill precluded you from answering our prayers like the syntax of opposing council’s legal arguments to promulgate your own Disneyland paradise of love, sex, and rock and roll for all the kids who obeyed your rules.  

The dichotomy between how ridiculous it feels to hope for indulgences we were “supposed” to deny ourselves on Earth as a reward for pleasing you is froth with hypocrisy.  Why not melt all the guns and knowledge to make them? Why not give a heart attack to anyone in the process of murder with your will like a six-year-old squishing ants?  Why not put the cure for aids in a dandelion seed?  Why not infinity?  It all boomerangs back to me that we are here for something else.

I am lying in sheets wrapped up alone, starring at a treatment-less window to a night sky of countless stars and speckles of planets dotted with other primordial ooze developed and contemplating mirrored-thoughts.  These beings blessed with the proper concoction of oxygen and carbon feel closer to me than you are right now.

I am praying to be wrong.  I am praying for a renewal of faith in justice, in love, in hope in even the energy to be angry again.  I pray to not pray out of routine or Pavlovian dogma.  I pray to use elucidative and exegetical language to impress you into paying attention and then feel guilty later as a mandatory sub-component of sanctimonious revelry.  

I pray because my parents pray and their parents pray and their parent’s prayed.  I pray to not disappoint them as if penitent to an absentee God for contemplating the avenue of atheism.  I pray for my daughter and son.  I pray to see God in all things as an interwoven web into the subtext of creation, that we are connected and undeniably interdependent.  In death we return to the nexus that is God.  

I pray that the trivial tragedies and joys of marriages, of cancer, of sporting events, of planes colliding into buildings, of lottery sequences, of Somali famine, of tsunami’s, of the Tamils and the Sinhalese, Darfur and Dachau are all negligible in comparison to the burgeoning in the returning to our place as part of you.  I pray that the paradigm of human eyes is obliterated by the consciousness of that which is greater than all of us.  I pray that we each can transcend this yearning for a rationale to conjoin in that which is beyond our human constructs.  I pray.

 

I am flawed, not saintly.  The father in me is grateful.  I am a vagabond, estrange me.  I am clawing for simple stark answers.  I am afraid to complain.  “Just keep your mouth shut and live your life son.”  My life preserver is cut loose.  My boots are weighted with interrogatories that can not be asked with a tongue. 

I am the tin man anesthetized to the metronome kaleidoscope of emotions.  I am walking away from the Emerald City after chopping my enemies and melting that witch and seeing some wrinkled cantankerous asshole slink out from beyond the curtain.  You offer me a puppet kingdom in his fun-house-land instead of the heart I asked for.  I want love back.  Fuck this Winkie Country consolation prize.

I will walk that golden-brick or muddied-stick road for you.  Just give me a task, a purpose a direction that comes from you and not some mysterious curtain with a flaming-green mitre-head.  Me, the girl in the silver bling-bling shoes, the stuffed-bellied straw man, the homosexual pussy cat, and the little hobbit dog could all have a place in this universe.  Not in some DXM poppy field of surrogate-matrix life, but we could have a real place leveled with and knowing the true consequence of fault.  

The cake is not a lie.  The inception was genuinely conceived by my own cerebral and cardiac sperm and egg conjoining.  The oxymoronic aphorism was my tardy recognition of your infinite doing.

 

I am exhausted.  I am barely over thirty.  I have lost my job, my wife, my child almost stripped from me.  Unnamed bodies lie dead.  I have been uprooted from your flood.  I am calling out.  The only life raft you gave me spun like an asp and tried to poison me after holding her dry in the mountain of my confidence.  

I have stood firm and replanted the roots of my faith in this rationalized existence out beyond thunder or Superdome only to see the nature of these constructions make me feel incompatible for all the love that would ever rationalize a sense of purpose to justify the wake of these waters wrapping at my door. 

I am alone in this bedroom beckoning, exposed raw and making onlookers uncomfortable.  Pleading with you like a siren, come to my rocky isle and take this infection and vaccinate me from this crisis of faith.  Stir the vials and inject the syringe of explanations to bubble in like the space that fills the gap of air that would otherwise be infiltrating my veins like a bomb on track to my heart.

I do not want to see this explode.  I do not want to admit this holy war is over.  I do not want to think by dis-acknowledging you I am somehow allowing your Beelzebub, Iblis, Mephistopheles, Lucifer, Mara, Satan or Bob counterpart to declare victory over my eternal soul, “Wa ha Ha!!!”  

Such sacrilegious defiance would be tantamount to slitting my eternal throat on this Damocles pendulum of Occam’s razor.  The idea that neither you nor the devil have ever existed sits like a duh on my kitchen countertop starring at me.  Fuck you.  The devil is just the antithesis to a monotheistic paradigm for an “It’s all good new world.”  Thank you, Judaism.  

Egyptian pharaohs with supermarket-aisle deities demanded perfect forty-five degree angled pyramids facing east to capture the sun to have the pharaoh reborn from death each day.  There were no aliens, no divine reasoning to these architectural anomalies just slave labor, narcissism, and later union strikes in the form of plagues.  Moses was the first Jimmy Hoffa with raised victory hands like Nixon over a Watergate Amalek.  Men battle under banners for pensions funded in prayer, blood, and teamster dues.  It’s all related, either extreme infected with infallible answer-givers of authority besotted drunkards. 

I do not want to believe in “pick your cereal box” faith.  I do not want to believe you do not exist just yet.  I shave every morning with Mr. O’s razor and the hairs grow back.  They continually break the surface into a field no matter how much trimming or slicing.  The roots of this conjecture erupt and you are nowhere to be seen or heard from except in books written by men who stared at goats.  

Maybe I could be one of those who purport to feel faith in you, I must worship you.  I must dedicate and open my carcass for your entry like a spiritual rape victim.  I must bend my asshole over for you to come visit me in the night, impregnating me without insertion and preserving the virgin birth of my faith.  I would be full with the ejaculation of your salvation with grandiose clarity like Mary.  I would feel your presence.  I too would have that glorious personal relationship with J.C.

I am so glad for this sign.  I can suffer contently.  My confusion has been solved.  The crisis is over.  I will never get to see my faithful family, my brothers and sisters again or the ghost of a wife.  The members of life will drown with my inquiries.  This would be my reward from a God finally coming clean, like a deadbeat parent showing up for college graduation.

Prodigal Jesus could return immune from recourse to the ramifications of his absence.  We can stare under the rug for the additional explanation that would have been of infinite assistance to well-intentioned souls.  We barter on the meaningless of exposed purpose to neutralize freewill like a blanket gag-order.  

Our mouths are stuffed with this sadomasochistic ball bit that if we mules spit out we would invalidate the jury.  The court could never arrive at an independent verdict in conclusion if our informed heads verbalized your one-to-one directions.  So we are stuck at this mistrial impasse with me in this bed with my eyes starring for you awaiting my court date. 

I feel like one of trillions of orphans, contemplating everyday, to shave or not.  Should I feel the scruff?  Should I cross so much of this off as, to do or do not, to the simplest answer, to what is or what is not, to see the consequence of freewill in absolute?  

You are a God powerless to move the pendulum except in story books of miracles counted on and performed as one time shows in years ago.  Only in the pageantry of oral history could you confide in humanity to see miracles like modern-day stop signs.  Today we are bypassed by distracted drivers chatting on cell phones.  We see tragedy and death circling.  We hear political police sirens bereft of hope that this was the course of an accident.  Will you come out of your nowhere and reverse mortality like a number-two pencil eraser?  Would you allow a bystander's iPhone to record it all to go viral?

The officers could be there.  The witnesses could be in place to see your hand heal some boy just walking along the side of the street, someone’s child dying.  Lazarus estranged come back to us.  Coincidence could step aside for faith. 

I could find a place to hold you like a newborn infant in my arms.  I could see you again anew a miracle imbued and yet, I blow you off in dandelion petals like a lover who has wronged me.  I acknowledge that we are simians as infinitely alone as the cockroaches or the butterflies.  Evilness and holiness and right and wrong will exist even if you do not.  There is no blanket or pass card, winter is coming, but spring will follow, and I pray.