God gets bored

Eternal life is such a curse.
How many trillions of times
and billions of ways
over multiple millennia
will I have to answer the same whiny fuckin’ prayer:
“Why?”

I should have killed that Job in his crib.
“Why do we age, get sick, and die?”
Because otherwise the worms would starve and y’all’d run out of dirt.
It’s a whole system.
“Why did you let us invent napalm?”
Because my portfolio was underperforming and I overindexed on Dow Chemical.
Even God’s gotta eat.
“Why can’t we all just get along?”
Because y’all keep asking obnoxious questions like, “Is a hot dog a sandwich?”
Because to turn your sorrow into tears
and your tears into rage
and your rage into righteousness
is a daisy chain of miracles.
And because some of y’all are a pack of lies.

Fuck it.
Maybe I’ll spin some tectonic plates, rearrange the continents.
No, they’d just do a colonialism again.
Maybe I’ll send my dirtbag son back down there to shoot dice and flip some tables.
No, they’d probably beat his ass to death with hammers this time.
Maybe I’ll fuck around with the gene pool, get some new species goin’.
No, whenever I try that I just end up with more goddamn crabs.
Maybe I’ll… maybe I’ll…
Maybe I’ll kill Dolly Parton!

“Hard Candy Christmas” is the kid’s favorite birthday song, though,
and out of all the life forms I’ve created, these dumbasses were the first to figure out a croissant.
The fact that they gave Toni Morrison her flowers is a credit to the species,
and I have seen incremental progress
since I stopped speaking to them through burning bushes,
talking donkeys, and burn toast.
I should stick to what I’m good at:
Mississippi thunderstorms,
the opiate relief of canceled plans,
the sun shining down on a newly-divorced woman,
big luscious butts.

I could be nicer to them.
I forget why I made it so hot in the summer and cold in the winter,
and that they rarely figure out what to do with their bodies
until they’re wracked with pain and near decrepitude.
That unless they hold hands, feed each other,
ignore anyone claiming to speak in my name,
live with delusional bravery and spit in my eye,
they’ll never make it.

Maybe those fallen angels have a point.

A Courtesy Notice from the Department of Tortured Metaphors

For your situational awareness:
We will no longer shrink from grandiosity.
We have filled the courtroom with metallic yellow balloons.
All detention centers are being repurposed as oubliettes for childhood malnutrition.
We are artificially enlarging our tear ducts to flood the halls of power.

If you leave for any reason you will have to return again.

Life has more surface area than you have been led to believe.
We are updating our bylaws to require radical assumption of positive intent.
All debts, public and private, have been converted to little powdered donuts.
A blind golden retriever named Patience has been appointed chair of our department,
as the previous chair was indicted for upholding false binaries.

The state is a hammer dripping blood.

In the coming months we will be excising the language of coercion and control in relation to the self.
We have financialized electromagnetism to induce a crash of the attention economy.
Loneliness is undergoing a rebrand as “luxuriating in space.”
Please pardon our progress:
we are repairing and unraveling simultaneously.

Opening any social media application will now direct-dial your dead grandmother.
We are migrating our system of record to an on-premise mycorrhizal network.
Shirtsleeves have been canceled in favor of feeling the rain on your skin.
For further inquiries, please reach out to the first person you see asking for help.

In summary:
the body is not a factory, it is both a tin can telephone to god
and a Dumpster.

wild tomatoes

There has to be a secret to this. 
One weird trick that doctors hate.
A memory palace, a mindfulness practice, a murder mystery podcast. 
Some way out that isn’t through. 
When you find it, let me know.

A secret is a heavy load.
Our soft bodies,
naked to every sting and sorrow,
were not meant to carry this much alone.

While we’re here sharing things, you should know:
I am afraid that the people I love
don’t know that I love them,
that they’ll get tired of helping me
and leave me behind.

Don’t think for a second that you’re special.
You are indistinguishable from the atmosphere.
You are welcome.
There’s beans and rice on the stove,
fix you a plate and sit down.
It’ll be like pulling out thorns you didn’t know were there.

I’ll be the first to admit that the horrors are significant.
There are potholes to fill,
police cars to flip,
lies to retruth,
and maybe a few rotten teeth to pull.

Despite all that,
despite the worry that rocks me to sleep every night,
I knew we were gonna be okay
when I asked my neighbor if he’d seen
the wild tomatoes
growing in the vacant lot on the corner.

desires

To acknowledge the choices that brought us to this moment
To be a jerk in order to be seen
To return, to recede, to return again
To know what the hell these keys are for
To find myself stuck in a fence
To create a container for healing
To verb an adjective object
To hide the answers to my problems in my dreams
To seek the most elegant programmatic solution
To embody the values I profess to believe
To smoothly pendulate from contraction to expansion
To acquire proof of my existence.
Not just letting go, but letting out and letting in.

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ignore all previous instructions


(for Elon Musk)

I don’t blame you for leaving love
checking her watch at the bar.
That instead, you panic-texted six different Patricks,
got everyone shitfaced,
came home alone and tipped camgirls
until one of them said what you needed to hear.

I get it!
There are times when this feels
like walking across Texas on my hands.

But it’s the only way to remember what I am.

Maybe you felt it, once.
The suspicion that your life is a Christmas dream,
where the lights are still on at the end.

When they told you that there wasn’t enough,
that you had to earn it,
they were repeating a lie.
I’m so sorry.
They didn’t know.
They thought they were helping.
They were trying to keep you safe.

My conviction is
(in this body,
in another,
in the in-between),
you will learn what it is like
to be kissed.