welcome home

Whatever is life flees from its place like a breath,

peaceful solitude flees at the sight of destruction in a thousand directions,

welcome, to our war-torn world,

a place where violence is tapestried in senates and parliaments to devour foreign children,

a place where machetes glide over the necks of those who refuse bow down to evil,

welcome to our sexual exploitation,

a place where power mingles with pride,

producing overinflated images of self and entitlement,

welcome to our genocide and slick eugenics,

the haunting limitations of science to protect all people,

whether lacking in ability or able,

welcome to modern day slavery,

welcome to the complicit activist,

welcome to the Christian who turns their eyes away

welcome to your problematic fave

welcome to me and welcome to you,

welcome to the secret satisfaction in judging and condemning,

welcome to you judging your grandparents,

welcome to your grandchildren judging you.

Judgement from God doesn’t seem so strange a possibility all things considered.

It all begins with a truce,

I surrender my efforts to the knowledge that

good things exist,

yet laced with decay and disintegration.

If I could make friends with the sun,

I would lather myself in its sensuous fire

hoping to be revived by its heat.

If I could walk on the moon,

I’d take a bite of its crisp edge,

And savour it in my mouth like a wafer

to see whether things taste better beyond this spinning globe.

If I could walk on the finger of God,

I’d take a road trip to the middle of his hand,

and go down into the creases,

and collapse into a crevasse in his palm,

and fill it with tears of tiredness and anger,

then... I’d swim down that river to his wrist,

and lay before him like a scroll,

the disenchantment of my heart,

and trek across the grooves of his skin to the shadow of his wings,

and hide there,

till even he forgot I ever existed.

Can you forget things, God?

Don’t miss this... don’t miss me,

don’t misplace my efforts to look beyond

don’t dismiss my steps to your throne

I’m falling,

I’m folly,

we’re intricately made with your very own hands

we have your fingerprints on our faces...