How New Religions Are Born

A priest
who had just heard confession
stepped out of the booth
and
staggered,
then righted himself.

Inside his head,
one of the sins he’d just heard
had raged about for a while
and slapped God.
The priest saw him slip off His throne
and slump against the wall
of his skull.

“What was that?”
said a lone parishioner
entering the church.  “What was
that cracking, that thud?” 

And the priest thought,
and almost said
to the woman,

“That was the sound of
God falling against
the dark wall of my skull,
and possibly also the beginning
of a new Bible,”

but instead 
he merely smiled, 
and told her it was nothing.

He walked then
from confessional
back to altar
in the empty room —
a straight line
he almost succeeded in walking
without a misstep,
without imagining
tremors.