We Lived

We lived in the long intolerable called God. We seemed happy. I don’t mean content I mean heroin happy, donkey dentures, I mean drycleaned deacons expunging suffering from Calcutta with the cut of their jaws I mean the always alto and surely anusless angels divvying up the deviled eggs and jello salad in the after-rapture I mean to be mean. Dear Lord forgive the love I have for you and your fervent servants. I have so long sojourned Lord among the mild ironies and tolerable gods that what comes first to mind when I’m of a mind to witness is muriatic acid eating through the veins of one whose pains were so great she wanted only out, Lord, out. She too worshipped you. She too popped her little pill of soul. Lord if I implore you please just please leave me alone is that a prayer that’s every instance answered? I remember one Wednesday witness told of a time his smack-freaked friends lashed him to the back of a Brahman bull that bucked and shook until like great bleeding wings the man’s collarbones exploded out of his skin. Long pause. “It was then,” the man said, “right then…” Yes. And how long before that man- turned-deacon-turned-scourge-of-sin began his ruinous and (one would guess) Holy Spirit-less affair? At what point did this poem abandon even the pretense of prayer? Imagine a man alive in the long intolerable time made of nothing but rut and rot, a wormward gaze even to his days’ sudden heavens. There is the suffering existence answers: it carves from cheeks and choices the faces we in fact are; and there is the suffering of primal silence, which seeps and drifts like a long fog that when it lifts leaves nothing but the same poor sod. Dear God—