As I Understand God

a cycle of poems in three scenes

I committed to attempting to describe my higher power for 100 days. Some days it was journaling, some was rambling, some was short poems. I reduced that down to 21 very short poems and grouped them in what seemed like three acts of a play. The things I ended up attracted to seemed to express the irrationality of the idea.

Scene 1 – The Optimist

As I Understand God

The wind swirling in the

curved pot.

Ten roller derbies

racing at exponentially

increasing speeds.

A hundred mixers spinning

on high.

A thousand cooks.

God as a Cockroach

My higher power is

a random list.

It needs

to be cyclically

destroyed, and then

blown out to Canada.

The drive train is

solid.

The warranty whips

mesothelioma into

stormfronts.

The people that entered

the temple emerge

as a black flood.

The Click

The air just aIer the swallows

flee. The cadillac of the cumulonimbus.

The uber black hole nine-hundred

ninety-nine-thousand-universes

wide.

Kicks up a trail

of gravel.

Has no need

of metaphors.

God is what I

cannot remember

saying.

God is the flick.

We invent the type

writer and God

invents the

descent of the

key.

God is the key

snapping back.

God is the click.

Scene 2 – Two Activists

Ghost Author

When the keyboard writes the mind

an impulse making contact with a

conductive substance speaks.

My words spiral into a tube.

When you open my letter in

Burundi, it has already changed

from what was written in Poland.

I direct you to take a class

in calligraphy to tamperproof our

conversations, but someone can

write in that same flourish, and

I can’t tell which words are mine.

I even begin to prefer those

of this ghost author.

Glencoe Massacre

I am one among many,

to you, not

your only one, now. Only

in the presence of

my God

am I a reconstructed

thatched house

reminding us how

people lived after

the Glencoe Massacre, not

just how they died.

Scene 3 – The AA Meeting

4-8 actors

My Higher Power as a Wooden Ship

Stately, heralded, sliding across

the sky; a reflection of a tree in a cloud out

where no tree exists.

My Higher Power Drinking out of Katy Perry’s Head

Drunk, we whirled, lying,

till we were dead. But my higher

power drank

out of Katy Perry’s head.

My Higher Power in a Tent

This is what they gave us

even though the Sears Tower

was empty.

My Higher Power as a Snowstorm

Edging the branches in the

inverse of volume, white light, they

boogie against the night.

The light of God planned for the

winter months, but we

were bunched against it.

My Higher Power as Sartre in Reverse

Himself to appear, he

and me appears he;

general in things

external to bound

remains he, therefore.

My Higher Power as the Winds of Scotland

The loch is choppy

the tide reversed

the lambs have their

asses facing

the rain. It is spitting

darkness. No wonder

Macbeth was set in this

God-forsaken castle.

My Higher Power as the Shetlands

Wind-whipped, unvisited,

it takes a determined sort

to cross by ferry

nine times a day.

My Higher Power as Russia

Everyone was going to go

to the Black Sea for Christmas

but then Christmas was moved

to December 25th,

goddammit.

My Higher Power as the Soufflé

It is custardy

and yellow. Bubbled. Edged

in rust. A faint smudge

of a mushroom.

Holy you. Holy

there.

My Higher Power as the Inner Eye

You see from

the cockpit of my throat my brain

is a big mouthed bass

pursuing minnows and

caddisflies: this fish-fleshed

robe of learning.

My Higher Power as Molecules

We are said to be made of tiny

particles. Grains of salt, even ––

white, glinting, whirling,

who early in the tale

encounter their nemesis,

pepper.

My Higher Power as a Tinkling Sound

At the edge of consciousness, not

a bell, but very like it.

My Higher Power as Revela6ons Redacted

Every island fled upon a talent

because of

the plague

saying unto

the kings,

drunk with a scarlet-colored

cup, “The mother of Earth,

chosen, and faithful,

shall

be found in thee.”

My Higher Power as Three More to Go

My higher power has set two

cups aside and next to it,

one.

My Higher Power as One Hundred

In the meantime, we burned

our lamps, in a number equal to and greater

than the ocean,

which is the hiss our brain supplies

in the absence of sound.

My Higher Power as the Things We Didn’t Say

There were always too

few words to portray the infinite bay we glimpsed

when the road curved out

and the mountains

dropped away.

END