Bent, brooding and begging

In a shrouded long ago,

I asked a preacher, a Methodist,

if he really believed

in god. The question meant no outrage

and met none.

I did not say

fervently though you believe,

I do not understand your fervor.

Feverishly though you pray,

I do not understand your fever.

I do not understand this god of yours,

neither the shape of the thing,

nor its gender.

Neither do I understand its aspiration

for you or for us all.

I have no grip or grasp

on the universe in which it dwells,

nor why it lives there,

nor why it lives, at all.

I understand your faith has power

and stretches backward

a millennium, or more.

But I fear this is the weight

you drag behind and the cause that has you looking

to the day on which you finally will be weightless.

And he made no response to what

I did not say, but looked

the question do-you-know

of what or to whom you speak.

Ministers aside, consider,

the history of the rulers

and the ruled and why it matters now.

There are also the poems written

to draw nearer to you

and the ones rooted

in an inability to bridge

our mutual gap.

There is also the biography

of my solar-powered self

in every meaning of the term,

warm and heating up,

flaring and flaming,

sunning and indolent,

abiding the gloom,

outlasting the dark.

I am the rustle of the wind

and the sound of revolution,

the silence of defeat

and the rot at the heart of empire.

I am invention

and the means of installation.

I am the sun-dried husk,

the ruined dream,

the broken rampart,

the collapsing core,

the melancholy song,

the calloused, wracked and shackled,

the wicked wish,

the vengeful hand,

the dying.

I miss what I miss and whom.
Soon enough, I will be death

in every savage flake and pore.