America is the land of cults
and cult leaders,
of hyperbole and death
by truth in fiction.
When I was nine years old I gas lit myself
with a careless swing of wool
on an elderly breathing stove
When I was eleven years old I gas lit myself
again
ignoring every sign that Santa Claus did not exist
because I wanted to believe in magic.
My sister and I took a Ouija board
from downstairs
and we asked that sacred question,
Is he real?
The planchette pushed itself to yes,
I think about this sometimes,
Was it a friendly ghost?
or the gentle force of desire permeating
both of our young minds.
That Christmas we stared at the stars
from the ear of the eye of our home
and saw a satellite
but believed it could be a saint
floating through the night.
It was not until I told my mother
and she laughed at us
that I realized
it had been a lie all along.
A cruel collective joke.
I empathize to some degree now,
with the have-nots who choose to believe in magic
in the form of their cult leader, who
shares nothing with humanity
in our propensity for error.
I know,
that the lie can continue
for as long as you choose
to avoid
staring at the teeth
of the beast.
But, sometimes its best to look the shark in the mouth
in order to avoid the bites.
I suppose only time will tell
if this is how we will bleed out and die.
It was a Sunday evening.
The temperature high in the hundreds.
The repairman’s chain dangled
like a rosary might on the dashboard
of someone who feared both the wrath of god
and the idea of the devil.
“Hell I haven’t seen something this glitchy, in quite a frisky minute.”
“Can you fix it?”
“Not sure but I think I can try”
He smacked the top of the boy’s head
no light appeared behind the twin screens.
“We already tried that”
“Well here’s your problem” He gestured to the three toothed tail. “Always,
make sure its plugged into its sense of purpose. Artificial is fine makes no difference”
*Powers on*
*Channel 1*
I wander in the desert.
Guided only by a precious stone in the sky.
Its monsoon season but it has been raining dust for days.
I don’t have any conventional sense of purpose
perhaps because I think too much about it.
I also lack an internal compass.
It makes me think that maybe my ability to easily get lost
is connected to the frequent feeling I am plagued with
of
being
lost.
I don’t really know how or why I got here.
I have tried on a lot of
belief systems, moral foundations, studied ontology in the hopes that some
chapter somewhere in a book I have not yet read
will elucidate that heavy question
that looms over me
casting a shadow on all that I do,
like a cumulonimbus cloud
with a god complex.
them
. . .
