a man so petty and cruel in life could only love like the ringing of a hammer on steel. i am a coward, as is he; so he beats the cowardice out of me. he tells me all other people delight in schadenfreude, as does he. it is only us against the world; no one else could love something as cruel as he is, as am i.

avoiding the same mistakes baked in genetically is harder than i thought; i only wanted to be worthy of my own pain, trying to be a noble man, a mountain of debt piled up from **** and beatings and gallons of midnight oil burnt, kerosene down the drain, fuel spluttering in a six-cylinder engine. i think i understand original sin now, one rib torn out, trauma passed to the bottom left. god looks down at me and wonders where i'm going. standing at the altar in His house with a stolen rosary and a hand dipped in the baptismal font as though it cancels out the theft like some game of divine arithmetic, heavenly haggling at the gates, staring at the pews like one does at a stranger's grave.

i still look for you in endless skies and infinite depths, in artificially beating hearts and macro-micro scale, past the schwarzschild radius, inside the electron orbital. the mere thought of you dwarfs everything that could be and can be conceptualised or philosophised or made, even as our descendants reach for the stars and become gods and synthesise emotions and transcend physical form, when history is a nightmare the human consciousness is trying to wake up from, there will be others too who love and lose like i did.

you're not catholic, per se, but you never quite felt okay with not feeling pain

god are you there? please talk to me

god?

please

there is teeth, that i have, and there is marrow, which i do not,
because when we slaughter this year's chickens in preparation for a feast we will eat all of it,
just like you have taken my bones and emptied them,
you do not have teeth, resigned to suckle ,
i wish i was free of taint, there is teeth, that i have, and i wished i had ,had the nerve to bite back,
because there is only the remnants of a proboscis eating my marrow,