God’s
Name is knot
Abracadabra
Too be unloosed
Unwhirled
As owed man
Putting on
Some kind
Of spectacle
Who’s genesis
Giving
No quarter
To years
Behind
In a sense
Out right hostility
And udder a version
Sow called
Crater of the whirled
And awe wanting
Clear too see
Not a wood be casket
Drowning in a box
That must
Not hold water
As wee might reckon
Only too be
Delivered
In the final seeing
As figure out
By no means
Self evident
Pulling rabid
From won’s hat
Empty
Sored in passable caskets
Wee suspect
As a parent harms
As sure as there are no teeth
In taking
A bullet to the head
Wear the art
Matter’s not
And yet
Who is
The one
Cutting people in
Have
Awe that is given
Taking it
To the blank
As grater than
A loathe of bred
From nothing
Excepting freely
Wile rooting fore the nix
In a New York minute
As some goaled in goose egg
In disposed
Of whatever
Ladder day judge meant
Too due no wrung
As diff a cult
To under stand
As re-bounding
Back to the show
Is caping
Behind curtains
For the wrest of us
Only too be duped
In mere images
Peering real
Mirrorly a muse
Meant for inspiration
Knot too be swallowed
Hole in won
Or fish tails sow bred
Subject to
Dis tract
As divine accessory
And slight offhand
In vane miss direction
On the eve of knowledge
As simply a trick
Convinced one no’s
How it is
Done
Nothing
Too see
Hear
More than wee in vision
In blinding silence fallow
In a tacit urn hoarse
And yack knowledge
A bit fancy
Meager too please
As inn sufficient
Comforted buy con jury
In the worst kind
Of source err he
As if
Got hour
Back
To slots plain
As abettor
Be helled
No good
For make believe
When cloaked in daggers
This poem strikes a familiar theme of mine, the parent elusiveness of God and the unsophisticated ways of even daring to speak of such things from most any perspective brought to bear. The dark side of religion has wreaked hellish trauma, bludgeoning both real people and tender hope for sublime understanding. Militants, that is fundamentalists, from both theist and atheist perspectives routinely bash each other. Religionists often infantalize atheists, and atheists are often eager to throw the baby out with the bathwater. My guess is that if theists and atheists got together and compiled all of the gods they don’t believe in, that there would be a pantheon of common ground. I view militancy, that is fundamentalism, as the primary divide, not theism and atheism. There are plenty of poor intentions and chronic misunderstandings to go around. As I see it, militancy bespeaks violence, that is a commitment to winning by creating losers, forever separated buy uncrossable divides in human life, terminally fighting over uncommon ground. Fundamentalism of all types reduces perpetual paradoxes and the centrality of metaphorical ways of seeing the higher aspects of life to small-minded literalism stuck arguing facts rather than truth and stiff-hearted relationships valuing right ideology over harmonious community. The siblings of truth and harmony, which are deep quests of theists and atheists, religion and science, or of anyone seeking to work out the seems of their worldview, knead less judgment and a sober patience unwilling to bury others in uncommon ground.
As in most conflicts, power and trust are the ultimate issues, or perhaps more to the point, abuses of power and trust. Personally, I am increasingly convinced that absolute power absolutely corrupts. Hell, I even believe God shares power in order to create a better overall world, that is not merely more benevolent and fair, but creates the very foundations for the highest human aspirations and shatters the ceiling of cosmological and worldly puppetry (and the inevitable puppet tiers). I experience my most human living on a small-scale, in community, where direct accountability to one another breeds well proportioned living. This brings humanity to power and builds trust seamlessly into the process. Such human-scaled enterprises are far more sane, represented by the encouraging movements to local — not loco. Large-scale enterprises are typically suited and tied in hubris, albeit the the finest hubris civilization can offer. Only such large-scale undertakings can globalize insanity alongside the endemic learned helplessness paralyzed in the reality of “how did we get here?!” In human community, power resides in people. Power in human community requires consent. Complicated — often called “civilized” — nonhuman mechanisms to consolidate power, typically under the auspices of creating “bigger and better” things, ultimately rely on people’s consent. This often does succeed in producing bigger things; though the better part, our humanity, commensurately suffers in the accelerating smallness and relative unimportance of people in such enterprises. Not surprisingly, people, not built for such inhumanity, become viewed as the problem, gumming up the efficient workings of the machine. Depressingly sow, our views of human nature are then tempted to align with the misanthropic view that people are less important than things — see corporate personhood. Withdraw consent and these nonhuman and inhuman structures and mechanism whither. This speaks to the importance of protest and noncooperation/resistance to appointed authorities of all unkinds. Opting out of institutional and corporate enterprises starves the beast and frees up time and life energies for building alternative human communities. Active noncooperation and resistance naturally arise as the dominant and dominating culture (sic) inevitably will clash with any growing culture (hopefully viral) that questions the sick assumptions and unearned trust of its immeasurable victims. In such a project, Jesus radicals, atheist anarchists, and sordid kinds of others can find common ground, fertile for reclaiming our humanity in a whirled of profit tiers. Let us not be distracted by our differences, but rather unite in disavowing all things undermining the human heart.
