i feel a heavy cry
pale
and watery
bricks
a sun is setting
dragging out and down
the entire blue sky
why does it run away from me?
what did i do?
i feel a heavy cry
eking barely out
i want release
i want release
my heart is Vesuvius
i wish
to be covered me in ash
//make known to the world
what i hide inside
my heart is Vesuvius
cover me in ash
When there are twelve of them
it is a sea.
I am lucky to be alive
with so much life around me.
We are not sailors
but there is something to the starboard way
// to the wind in our sails we need
more today than yesterday.
So much of their life
is spent in a day —
such a large fraction is
the next thing I say.
They wonder so much more
than all the adults I know —
their appetite for answers
exceeds their patience though.
Christ let me not do what my parents did.
GOD let me not ever say “because I said so”
// again
and GOD, if YOU would, see our sails are all out
please take a big breath and blow us about.
Amen.
indiscriminate
tumult
in me
rowdy mouths
I want to talk to every one
and calm them down
// instead I’m all just
heavy
lungs
in a sickly littered
ugly hug
is there no spirit in me to speak?
no gift of tongues
even when I need them?
8 o’clock
& we aren’t eating
// we said we would
we said at 8 o’clock
but I undid it
us
I knew
I knew I would
Holy ghost in me
I never wanted anything.
I pray more than most, I think.
I heard all design & architecture
is pudendum
simulacra.
// not for the life of me
not me
Holy god in us
why curse our legs to carry
the weight of hell between them?
I was glad to call it sin
until, at once, matrimony
took all the sense
I’d made of it.
I had mine
known from me.
I just wished
this would feel different &
it didn’t.
Holy christ
a ghost
a wind in me —
let me be desired
and desire to be.
Jesus fucking god almighty
let me leave the body
to love without our organs in my way.
her words ran out
and // I wanted to give her more
and couldn’t
and knew it
so I scattered pens
I democratized the lines
to let her complete in the reader’s mind
I saw a veil
where her throat should be
a veil
from before the one that Jesus tore
barely breathing &
peaking out
and behind it all
was everyone
advertising answers
for grief barely begun
I couldn’t tell if she was holding it all up
or taking it down
or if she had integrated it
into who she is now
the strangle
that potential holds
the string
I see // what I could be
it gets away
& lower mystery
is there // something
I know
it leads
to who I could be
down there
must be my soul
my heart
or something
connecting
everything
finally offering
meaning
look // I learned
to never look
up // “a head down keeps the world at bay”
“in clouds we mistake
hope for pain” they say
the Greeks put the gods up there
the Greeks were so confused
we know now
we keep our heads down
we dream the rational way
follow this string
to be all
all they say I can
all they say
I will
all I have to be
in my mind
christ is babe
or he is dying
he is 30 and calling my friends and I
a brood of vipers
in our temples
in my mind christ is happy
smiling, or something, all the time
but
he would not be as good a god
if he knew not what it is like
to be a young
confused and suffering
to scrape ones knee and know the world is ending
to bump our heads and bleed
I had never been as young as I was
the day my 30 years of plans
came crumbling in
& when they did
I found myself born all over again
I held out my hands and looked to my side
on his knees, I saw the divine
a child surrounded
I saw him young
as young as me
scared, and weeping,
a facsimile of Gethsemane
the spirit above and below him
a child’s face
& a child’s tears
going by the name of GOD
I knew
that he knew
the intensity of feeling
knowing something somewhere is holy
but not knowing where to find it
or what it could be
your face in your knees
hoping it’s an ocean
an ocean above and below
barely breathing
half hoping you’ll be swallowed
half hoping this very memory will be extinguished eventually
but what I saw in his boyish face
was space
to give my grief a proper name
and a place to stay
I wonder how often he tapped into the sorrow of the earth
and I wonder how often it overtook him
& so it was in the curling of his little body
that I knew he meant it
that I knew he could see
and understand completely
I’d always known I was never as hidden from him
as I think I intended to be
but for the first time in my life
that thought did not completely terrify me
I still limp him along
he in my head
words on my tongue
half are mine half are his
hard to say
which is which
I still limp him along
when I get drunk
when I scold the young
or love someone
I limp him along
in the sounds that I make
wishing all my pain away
I limp him along
through the cries of a cat
the smell of his clothes, and the cloves that he smoked in them
I wish came back
oh I limp along
oh I limp along
I would think more of it
and of after it
were it not for him
I’m glad to know he knows its answers
& glad to know I do not know them
To say that god is good
should feel to us, it seems to me,
as thanking stovetops for burning fingertips
and water for flooded lungs.
To say that god is good
is to hold a world of suffering (with smattered lightness)
and wish into existence
rather than
completely extinguish.
To say that god is good
unironically overestimates
the weight of human kindness and love
on every scale of suffering
we think up.
We should sense the tables turning over
in our rebellion to the heat
of everlasting suffering (we are destined to create)
when we look out at all of this
and wish for more of it.
To say that god is good
is contradictory on purpose —
it is Sisyphus happily
seeing stone-rolling art
as what the human soul can do
when in the image of god.
To say that god is good
should sound as wrong to westerners
as every eastern religion does
when we are all the tao and the tao is everything
and desire passes over our bodies.
You have to live a little while,
I think, to appreciate the claim.
Three-year-olds don’t know yet
that their pain is not okay.
They cry just to be heard
and all we do
is wish they wouldn’t.
To say that god is good
is what we knew at first:
that it does not matter how long we live
or if we trip and fall
because existing was always suffering
we just didn’t mind at all.
i want to (someday)
be alive for the joy
of living
//not for the other people
not for the other sake of
not letting all of all of the people down
//not anticipating
some payout
not for the hope of
not for tomorrow
i want to (someday)
be alive
for the sake
of being alive
and wanting to be
nathanael.ink 