The God you follow
has no guts.
Fucker full of peace,
not a mark on him
from fighting back.

Oh, I can’t go there…
I need a big-ass
warrior god, no Daddy
with a sensitive hand.
One that’s both male and female
and not afraid to hang
it all out for viewing.

Most of all One
who will put a hand on the scruff
of anyone sniveling down
on a frightful knee

and sneer into that wet face:

“Save yourself.”

This is how I learned it

On the one hand, you’ve got Big Shiny Jesus
all sweetness
and little-children-come-unto-me cuddly

and then you’ve got Scary Bloody Jesus
with the big wounds
and the just-got-in-from-Hell-and-
boy-are-my-arms-tired
three day thousand yard stare

On my own I figured out
that on the third hand
is the Jesus who built his own crucifix
and nailed himself there with a rueful smile

Whatever I wanted most was Jesus
so I sang it out

Lay me like a babe
in the arms of Mother Jesus
so he can toss me backwards over his thorny head
in a salty ritual against the enticements of Satan
Let me grab hold of the ammo belt
of Soldier Jesus and bring him
into my trench before he’s cut down

I loved him like a mirror

Then Dr. Jesus of the plastic surgery
refused to take a rosy scalpel to my fat thighs
I demanded of him
Why don’t you ante up, bub
Why don’t you make me over

and Jesus of the dreadlocks
in the blue grime rags of the alley
wouldn’t take my pity dollars
unless I danced for him

and my Righteous Jesus went through a phase
where he’d only listen to Rise Against
and bemoan my bad taste

I started to hate him for that

Later the Dice Thrower Jesus
laughed at Einstein whenever I chewed my nails
over bills and lack of work
Never pushed a buck my way
Your roll, buddy, he’d say
Your roll

So I stole his robe one day when he was in the shower
Went through his papers and passed his information
to the local authorities
This guy bears watching, I told them
Must be some kind of witch
but you connect the dots
Not my area of expertise

Chameleon Son of a Bitch
I will not imagine a color for him now
I have been there and it’s pointless
The book isn’t clear on anything except
the carpentry
the puzzles
and the Godawful way he died and came back
to haunt us

I’m not a fan anymore
though I keep looking over my shoulder
for whatever Jesus it is I’m afraid I overlooked

Praise to the Being
not to be called God
for that is understood
as a Noun and not
a Verb
by too many
and it should be known by all
that this is praise for the entirety
of All, its ongoing
Going, its Movement
and Shifting Nature;

praise be to Being, then,
to grouching and farting
at daybreak before work,
to loneliness of the unemployed
facing the emptying streets,
to the words “what exactly shall I do today?”
and the words “I wish I was doing anything else,
not what I am doing now or
am about to do,” praise to the chance
of change or the comfort of no change;

praise to the dead of last night
who are beyond the new things
of this morning, who are Elsewhere;

praise to the positive
who fool themselves, the negative
who fool themselves, the ones
who are not thinking at all today
but who move solely in response;

praise to the calculation
of the middle aged man
who looks at his life and decides
there are maybe fifteen years left in it,
who decides to live as he has been
because he is glad of the short term;

praise to the calculation
of the middle aged man
who looks at his life and decides
there are are maybe fifteen years left in it,
and decides that it is not enough,
and sets his coffee down and goes outside
and walks to the corner, is winded, goes back
to the living room and knows he’ll do more
tomorrow, who believes again
in tomorrow;

praise to the Internet
and its fallacies, its snap judgments
and foolish conspiracies, its reinforcement
of the worst, its stupid cats
and moments of connection facilitated
by the dumb video, the effervescence
of a spoiling joke, praise always
to the moment as revealed and removed;

praise to the things we always forget to praise
and cannot recall now, but they exist and do not fail
to appear at the right moments, they know
when they are needed, come through phone calls
and unexpected visits, letters, odd news stories,
mentions by random strangers, trashing of old yearbooks
and bills from vacations forgotten in the rush of Being;

praise then for that Being, for all Being known and unknown;

praise for disgust at slipping through the cracks,
for shame at crossed fingers on rent day, for joy in ten-dollar prizes
on lottery tickets, for rage at celebrity,
politics, terror alerts and body searches,
for imprisonment of whole generations of our own;

praise for the privately balled fists of the pacifists;

praise for the soldier cradling his enemy’s child
after killing the enemy;

praise for the moldy bread
in the mouth of the stray, for the tinfoil hat,
for the long shelves of pills illuminated by sunrise
through the narrow apartment window;

praise for the silence in which only Being exists
and for the stark fact of another day
exactly like the last one,
exactly like the next one;

praise for the Being of Being itself
and its sacred and profane wind
that is like unto the breath of the beating wings
of the Angels we are
as we trumpet in hope of the End of Days
again and again
until the Days indeed end
as if there were only days, no history,
no progress;

praise at last and again and always for Being,
simple and dear in the light of Order
that appears as Chaos
but is magnificent in its
sealed completion.

we cobble
faith
together

from the odd street-Christian tract
comic books
snatches of poems
random lines from TV

slip it into our thin wallets
as if
it could feed us

and starve while we imagine ourselves
well-fed

As if flour had been flung
onto a gas flame,
all the words
we have ever uses for God
are in the air,
and the air is on fire.

The birds
are alight and falling
to earth now. Earlier
I saw a robin on the sidewalk,
still smoldering, still singing
praise.

I brought it inside
and tended it as it died,
then set to work transcribing
the hymns of combustion
it gave me as it coughed
and choked.

Who but a crazy man
sits inside writing of God
on a Saturday night
surrounded with the smell
of burning bread
and feathers?

Who indeed,
I ask myself, invoking
sacrificed birds
while the earth piles deep
with bodies. But this is how
I pray in these last days: inside, silently —

but I keep a bag of flour
near the stove in case
the silent words ever become
too oppresive to bear.
I know this can kill me.
I know it will be

a horrible way to offer myself to God
but when I do, at least
I will fly up singing
and fall back
in light
and heat.

Grow excited by the possibility
of pure belief — belief being
the state of not knowing something empirically —

the possibility of never having to “know” anything
ever again! 
Imagine waking to a day without
having to be smart

about the things you’ve always known.
Imagine taking a baby’s delight and terror
as your only guide for how to live.

There in the trees — don’t call it a robin —
you don’t know a thing
about mating calls, territorial marking,
communication among others of the same species.
Call it a song, a ghost, and perhaps
a deity speaking only to you: oh, for
the chance of a personal, naive experience
with the universe!

Treasure it, the baby’s mind,
it will not last long enough to matter
for a moment past this one —

you’ll translate, ask questions, frame it
immediately, become smart again.  But imagine this moment,

this innocence — imagine that
it could last. That emotion by itself
may carry you over the hump
of becoming human
right into a new being.

I lift the blind one last time before bed
and look out.
Nothing’s moving as far as I can see,
but I know

there’s a teeming,
an orgy, a war raging
among the microorganisms
in the yard.

Life doesn’t stop
because I imagine
nothing
when I sleep,

no matter how hard I pretend
that sleep is like death.
Nothing is like death except death,
and I’m not even sure of that,

which makes me smile as I turn off the lights.
“Fight and fuck,
divide and conquer,
my friends,” I say before I go,

realizing that right now
I’m as unnecessary to them
as my God is to me
whenever I am doing the same.

,