Regardless of my choice of origin
Whether I'm a bipedal ape,
or molded out of clay and rib
I sense it fruitless
To let the complexities of the cosmos
cause me strain

It does me no good
To give unrelenting effort
to a greed-like god
named “Understanding”

I am to wonder and wander
I am to live and love
I am to dance and ponder
To be free
of what's above

****** Mary, Mary Jane
Bible paper love

Ripping out your scriptures
Pray to God above

Lick the paper, next to Jesus,
He didn't sign up for this

Sent to live and die,
Drown in Serrano's ****

Worshipping thy neighbor
Drinking too much wine

Lungs that choke and cough,
God's perfect design

Flick the ashes on a cross
Higher than Babel

He's testing you, testing us,
A bite of sweet apple


****** Mary, Mary Jane
Bible paper love

Political turmoil grows
OJ is ungloved

Another day in paradise
Justice system fails

Incriminate the working class,
Starbucks runs this jail

Lock away the hippies,
**** your nirvana

Prison complex slavery,
Blame marijuana

Scientific research blooms,
Godless atheist

Smoking from Corinthians
American patriot

Sometimes, such as on days like today
I sit and I mourn for my long-forgotten faith
I miss the certainty of a Most Divine Plan
Those self-assured speeches of a holy man
Assurances he speaks for the Ordained Track
Promises of a Supreme Being who's got my back
On these days when I wish, reminisce and long
I can't help but wonder where it all went so wrong

It's not that I Believe that There Is No God
Or even that I am unsure whether to believe or not
I don't bother questioning if god is real
For there is a bigger issue at play, I feel
When I became faithless, it was just in HIS eyes
"Faithless" I am not; there's just so much to surmise

I have Faith that the sun will warm each new day
I have Faith that these heavy clouds will give rain
I have Faith in the ground solid on which I stand
I have faith; just not Faith in the Words of a Man

See, I have come to accept that I soon will die
More surely, in fact, than the sun that may rise
Any day that sun may not appear
That day of darkness that we so fear
I accept that any moment May advent my end
I accept that there May be a sunrise just round the bend

With my flawed, weak powers of human perception
Dependent as they are on my senses' inception
I cannot Know a god, not many nor One
Just as I cannot Know that tomorrow will come

Maybe it will, and maybe there is
after all,
But truly--
who among us can Know anything
at all?

I REACH OUT TO THE GREAT UNKOWN
with the natural hesitance of a child
nursed on plastic american protestantism,
always prosperity gospel or pariah,
answers just hidden behind a preacher's palm;
in retrospect i wonder what questions those
republican suburbanites crippled in their hatred
came to submit at the foot of the cross.
saccharine and soulless every sunday,
the rot reliably festering under the church stage,
brimstone traded for the wasteland of undecaying concrete.
i was baptized by a stranger in stagnant water,
now swaddled in the arms of a man who is not my Father.
i'm always the cold one. bad circulation when i'm turning away.
that abattoir left a pulsating wound at the
center of my chest— starved weeping
sickly and red.
every sunday, the worst thing i could do was be honest.
i worship with my hands,
i falter for words;
i never got to know the Lord in my youth
because He never called me back.
i find fragments of Him in lovers' eyes—
fingertips glancing over flesh as if
forbidden fruit, sweet real and warmed by sunlight.
i think God was always this;
physicality, connection,
the simple intimacy of making someone else laugh.
the only time i ever felt devout
was when i was walking to get an arizona tea
at the gas station next to the church with my friends.
stumbling over asphalt still sincere in my vulnerability.

He lifted his leg,
And ****** on
The Tree of Life,
The Tree of Knowledge,
And the entangled roots
Of all humanity.

Looking up to you with great hopes,
people climb those steps,
with their lives on the ropes,
crying they come, the people who wept.
To a statue of rock,
left all of their money, all the people who left.
You should be helping those people,
from the promises, you've kept.
Is it your benevolence or is it just a sweet theft?

It turned out to be a theft.
They died of poverty,
you killed them while they slept.
They died of hunger,
and on the roads, they crept.
They died of winter,
for they were all undressed.
They died of illness,
for their houses were unswept.
They all died because of you,
'cause you turned out to be inept.

God entered a welcoming ******’s womb
(as many among us have longed to do . . . )
Ascending, years later, from His own tomb
To rule and to reign from behind the blue.

       Passed over us: two thousand years—
       Short-term relief for lingering fears.

As if no big thing, these feats by our Lord.
We hear it so often our hearts grow dull.
We’ve nothing but sullen indifference toward
The One who achieved redemption in full.

       Blood on the door-posts of your heart;
       Egyptian doom: you know this part.

Theater of cruelty; His the main role.
Sad victim—until all fulfillment passed;
The playwright possessed of a blameless soul
whose angel stagehands assisted the cast.

       Now Romans marry Jewish brides;
       And Christ, the King of Kings, presides.