Desert Desire
In the morning:
I send you a song. I choose it carefully.
There’s always a reason, though no one ever asks.
I only seem to do this to one person at a time -
it’s my way of courting,
like leaving flowers at your door
a mouse corpse on your mat
I did not make it, I simply found it.
Dead things are how we say “I love you.”
Around 10 AM:
I light incense in several places
watch the smoke fill my apartment
as I ponder rituals that could accompany this moment.
Like everything, I insist on doing this backwards.
I crave faith, conviction, a sense of resonance.
I cherish catechism;
my fingers naturally curl to count a rosary.
But though I see things and hear voices,
do more than my time on my knees,
go through all the motions of the martyr,
I never pull the trigger
because I still don’t feel a thing.
Around 1995:
Religion was like any other fantasy world when I was a kid.
Jesus was a hero but not as brave as Ged,
a lot whinier than Frodo.
No cool powers.
He makes fish appear and walks on water?
So he’s Budget Aquaman, is what you’re saying.
No one divided the Bible from Bradley and Bradbury on the shelf
so it just seemed like it had too few dragons to me.
Just a boring story.
My first memory blinded me -
the sun off the water in a copper bucket
that also contained me.
Like the universe, the bucket was big enough for me
and the water
and the infinite light of the sun.
I could never see how this world needed God.
Every day since:
I loved you all wrong, then and now -
far too close, in all the wrong places.
Like tongue-kissing a goddess
Like bringing frankincense and myrrh to McDonalds
Like living all my life on my knees
worshiping the sixteen-year-olds we were.
Over time it’s become a genre
a color I paint in
one of those shapes that shows up again and again.
You’re in every drawing, every story -
or something like you -
the pieces of you I stole, and kept, and planted
in my dirt-floor-basement heart.
Each day there’s a new crop of mushrooms with your eyes.
They tug at my arms, whisper in my ears
Beg to be held, to be drawn,
to be immortalized,
to always be beloved
and dead.
