triptych temperature

Here's three pieces that pretty much sum up where my writing, and therefore: my head, has been lately.

---

Whether I follow a religion or just

observe these rituals as ways we seek Truth:

I am okay with that space.

I believe in a god-force. She- if I had to label a gender- is not

the wife of a nuclear family, silently vacuuming up our messes in her pearls.

She is active, moving, reeling through time and space.

She is Love embodied and Love unspoken. 

Omnicient, Omnipresent, Eternal, sure.

But She is not all-powerful.

She gave that up when She made this world

She gave that up when She gave us this earth

and the tools to destroy it.

She watches, She cries.

But She also handed me this aluminum can

filled me with fire,

and I’ll leave my rebel mark

graffiti colored Love

all over this broken down rock

and call it Beautiful.

— love rebellion, or: Break the F*cking Rules

---

I’m up to the ears—hairline— lord god I’m just fully underwater

with social media perfection

top-view portraits of world travelers’ brunch dates

hipster thick sliced toast, avocado roses

hashtag mimosas hashtag darlingweekend

soft pink and cream palettes and capsule wardrobes

air bnb wooden beam ceilings in mountains of Vermont

ivy covered doorways with baguettes

instagram mommas and instagram husbands,

babies and beach bods and growing up and isn’t it all

perfectly imperfect—

holy mother of little baby lord jesus christ I need a break.

need to spend my time apart from Interminable Comparison 

to find out what is here, what is still here:

who is still here.
 

— journey through Adult Assery

---

what sorts of things wait in that adult darkness?

it’s not creepy crawlies or tentacles under the bed-

it’s running that red light by accident,

it’s frowning at cellulite after years of self help books

it’s when we talk about love and you don’t believe in it

it’s Darkness, and only Darkness

it’s money troubles, it’s finding time, it’s cancer.

If I could get myself out

alone,

I would.

— I'm scared too, but we'll make it 




love,
bek

 
 

little t's

I looked back one day

and instead of the dutiful structural wall

I expected to be standing, marking the path I had been walking

the past few years:

each stone set on a foundation of Truths

most little t’s, with some big T Truths

God is Love, and Love is Real-

But that day, whenever it was exactly,

I turned around and found a little gremlin

was smashing around making a mess of it all-

even the foundation stones were crushed.

I wept, grieved for a while.

I was angry some. Heaven disappeared

and god was a deepening mystery

I read philosophers.

Nietzsche has plenty to say

But so does Abraham Heschel

and how Wonder is all he ever asked for

and god gave it to him.

I take this back to my wall.

Caputo steeps in the weakness of god:

unstable, barely functional-

I take some of this back to my wall.

Grace Jantzen reminds me that Deconstruction

is a way to reconstruction.

I take this back to my wall.

I wrestle with the gremlin for a year or two,

then decide to take a break because it’s exhausting

spending every moment in existential skepticism

and I’m just tired, damnit

god damnit.

yes, god, damn it, please.

If you’re there, if you have any power left

damn it.

and I’m just gonna take a break

and if that’s okay with you,

I’m gonna just let this go for now

so I can start breathing normally.

I go from being angry

inside the eternal dark night of my Kierkegaard-ian soul

waiting for the rubble to make itself a wall again, to pave itself

ahead of me, and

getting angry when it didn't—

To just letting the world happen to me;

listening to the words of poets

Who have long gone before me-

“Beyond our ideas of right-doing and wrong-doing,

there is a field. I’ll meet you there.” Rumi.

Who have known things closer than I could explain,

“Let everything happen to you; beauty and terror.

Just keep going. No feeling is final.” Rilke.

Who comforted me in my state,

“You only have to let the soft animal of your body

loves what it loves.” Mary Oliver.

Music saved me. Theatre is my Church. Art is my prayer.

Words have so much power if you let them.

So let them.

And then, one day, you may find yourself

asking those small, eternal questions again;

the wall crumbly but giving it a go-

the gremlin tamed and even cuddly. And then

meekly, like a child whispering in her mother’s ear:

“I love you,” to which she responds

“I loved you first.”