I remember the exact moment I lost
my faith
It was a poem I lived before I wrote
it
Staring up at a ceiling in
Ponchatoula Louisiana 2010
Lying on a bed that had been moved
four times since its initial purchase
About to be six
I remember looking at this bedroom
furniture I conceived my daughter in
The first house before Katrina and
the mold
I had not made time to buy curtains
I could see the forest behind the
property
At night with the sound of the
locomotive in the distance
I just lost my faith right there
with the train
Like there was a mail net on a post
in the olden days for pick up
In the morning I wrote this ten page
poem of layers angry and bartering
Recounting that night, I laugh at it
now like I really thought God listens
Like I really believed; I prayed
hard every day
Like a golden retriever Catholic boy
I thought growing up
That it mattered how many times I
said it
Like I had a routine when I put my
head on my pillow
Our Father, Glory Be, three Hail
Marys, Our Father
And if I fucked up the words like I
did at the living rosary in fourth grade
I started over because God doesn’t
like flawed plaudits
That night my prayer was like a beast
hunting
I asked where He was like come on
you are really late for car pool dad
I understand, but I pissed on
myself, and all the other kids were gone by then
But I stood in the dark with urine
in my khakis
Afraid to step away from the curb
Like if I ran to the gym to find a
toilet you would come and just drive off
Like you wouldn’t even look for me
or know where I was
I pounded that mattress with my
fists
Why does she get it all?
Adultery-husband, money, house, time
to watch our daughter grow up, a womb with a son
I don’t even hate her anymore; I
hate you; rather quit trying for a while
I’ll get intellectual and read
Hitchens and Dawkins and say life is about love or some shit
I’m good now and I was, for a while
She was satisfied with threatening
my bankruptcy with mortgages
Until it spread to my employment
Auditing a spouse abuse clinic and
they don’t want me to be their auditor anymore
Because the ex’s best friend is on
the local board and he heard stories
Now my yokel boss has heard stores
and it’s just better this way
In Tangipahoa Parish
God snuck back in and I fell in love
with a woman that loves Jesus
Now I’ve got abortion stories and a
living daughter
That looks at me like a compass
My brother wants me to keep standing
because my fucking birthday is coming up
That train just keeps knocking me
down
Six years, six years, before
that it was Arthur Andersen and Katrina
February 2014 God you gave me a
dream about a lioness eating my manhood
I grabbed that bitch by the jaws and
took my junk back
I felt empowered like a Bible story
hero solving crimes in reverie; the woman I got pregnant
Fours years later she had wanted to
marry me and I told her no
because I knew she didn’t love me
But I also knew I needed to love you
for me to feel worthy of her
Ain’t that some shit
I had that dream and I tried; she
meets the man of her life in two weeks
Two weeks and she swears she’s going
to marry him
But I found you God, I really
believed again like not religion but that God is real
We are part of the same stuff, the
good fucking stuff of the universe
I break down and buy the place, I
get depressed but I have you again
We’re like old drinking buddies,
except I don’t drink alone because I don’t trust myself
I meet a woman that blows the other
two away
I feel like ah, I see what you did
there, that plan thing
Everybody else found their dancing
partner and now maybe it is my turn
I wrote the dancer poems and she
could and wanted to read what I wrote,
“I see us like the sun and
moon. You are the moon; at night your
outside lights up venting the inner; in day you are dark your inner goes to
shadow. I am the sun; at night I appear
to vanish, but I am a constant in my dark core in an unstoppable fusion of
condensing elements of the universe. In
day I blind the world with a business suit and math hiding a platypus-writer
behind a right brained stereotype. In
night you tease the world with a grin fueled from distance.
The sun needs the moon to reflect
what he has to offer as without her no one can ever look at his essence
directly. The moon needs the sun to be
seen in her dazzling glory like the purpose of a man dancing is to let the
woman show off. He supports her like the
vase to her flower or the ray to her leaf.
Each shifts taking turns in the seen
and unseen, overlapping in phases always present in what most viewers would
never comprehend. The sun nor the moon
needs to be adjacent every moment. Yes
each needs to pass in phase, but each needs their alone. The knowledge the other exists in distance
brings balance. They share their
eclipses, their wax and wane in cycles of crescent and full, the tide and
growth of oceans. Each knows what the
other needs to survive.
The sun will never be a moon. The moon will never be a sun. The balance in the never births the beauty of
the Earth like a relationship both participate to breathe life, love, and
equilibrium through a shared vessel.”
I was alive like a god damn forest
fire, nourishing soils and charring the dead wood
And I prayed to you so thankfully
like life had spun from the seed it was always meant
On the turn of a Wednesday, a death
of her poor friend too young
The world spins and the carousel halts in a god damn email
My pleonastic letters and nothing,
just nothing
I mediate, I try to be a good dad, I
even put your name at the end of the prayers
I use with my daughter; Peace, Love,
We are all interconnected through God,
Those last two words didn’t use to
be there
Through you, this silence and its
past one o’clock in the morning
I went to yoga again the day I
started this poem
Like my new church to be in tune, to
feel the vibration of all that is
I read a poem about love in a French
Quarter bar
I came home to the same bed I am
trying to give away in another house I am trying to sell
I am typing and I am afraid I hear
that train whistle
The hum is getting to me God
I am about to go put my head on that
pillow
And I don’t know if I am going to
wake up ok
So this is my prayer; I have felt
sign after sign after sign
That she was my chance in this
universe after all of that I gave everything my heart had left
I’m crying empty; now I can’t even
look at the moon
I’m praying for a miracle, a god
blessed miracle
All I ever wanted was a reciprocal
love, maybe not forever, but maybe for a while?
For love has been so sparse, a few
scattered weeks before disasters
You gave me this writer’s voice I
used it to try to share love
The last felt like everything had
prepared me for her
My letter sits like the minute
before dawn; if it be your will please bring us out of this darkness
I will pay the world back in love seventy-seven fold
I just want a real chance because I
don’t know how much more I can take
This heart, these lungs, this spirit
just wants to feel you
Beat, beat, beat….
