You Who Pray

Where do your prayers go? 

My dreams last night of a tower struck by lightning 

And I became the tiniest of splinters, like a tiny mote of black—

I had been struggling for years with that

Fighting it inside me like a cancer, desperate for medicines

And doctors, remedies, techniques, therapists, specialists

Countless support systems and gurus and a lifetime

Of pain looking for pleasure, of pleasure looking for pain

And you just flicked it away like a spec of dust? 

Yes, it was something outside of myself

I’m sure of it, because if I could have done it all along 

With a snap of my fingers?

No, don’t tell me your name

Otherwise some insatiable victim inside me will pray to you

Thank you, worship you, nourish you with my devotion

You don’t deserve that

There’s a god for everything and a god of everything I think

But the circuit board seems impossibly complex—

And meanwhile, I am alone and considering…

The old high priestesses 

Must have been real technicians 

Or maybe one day we just close our eyes

Drop a round stone in a deep well

Feel the warmth of a mirror inside bubbling up

Conjuring colorful emotions and then

All the lights on the breaker board blinking: 

Ping, beep, sizzle, boop, zap, prayer

Like temple bells, the right kind of feeling overwhelmed

The right countenance, the right occasion, the right ritual

And even if you don’t believe in gods and theurgic ontology 

It happens

I’ll tell you this—only lazy people can’t imagine the complexity of life, life, life

You turn the keys to your car but don’t know how the engine works

And you bore yourself to death arguing if god exists

Or if you pray to the right one

Or if even if you do all the right things in the right way

If your rigid little dance will make you happy

If your rigid little philosophy will make you wise

If this rigid little battle of terrestrial wits

Will somehow give our species and edge over the stars

Because there are thought-ecosystems inside you

Too vast to measure comfortably, you

Make excuses, too painful to experiment with all of yourself

All at once

Or too prideful? 

Pea-sized portions of substance-non-substance

So ancient, so meaningful, so colored and historied and peopled and artistically beyond

Your fractured inner serfdom, by comparison… you would instead feel an urge

To burn the gray weeds, burnt mudpole, crackled clay, leaning puddles…

What would your ancient ancestors say? 

It should feel urgent, this fundamental juxtaposition

It's not a debate but an inner faculty to be reoriented 

Or are you happy being driftwood in a deluge? 

Do you enjoy existential dread? 

Put your damn hands over where your heart should be

(For the umpteenth time, I command myself)

And say something real!

And then imagine inside you a spiraling, uprising, and pronounce: 

I am a mirror and its beingness imagines that I am reborn

Like a columbine spinning upon a strong foundation

Turning a thousand times a minute, stable but spinning, changing 

Not because I need belief, or want something, or for faith or answers:

Just a scientist poking around existence 

Not meditation, not for profit, not hierarchy 

Just truth in being and with a little luck

Vast, conscious flesh will push and pull and pluck 

New senses, long dormant memories singing…

Phantom spiritual personalities 

Bringing forward bridges to play across

A game much greater than just one eon

With rules that strangely require

A voice that sings with every last drop of 

Childhood, youth, adulthood, old age—a single chord of breath

To capture every moment of our existence: one vibrating YES 

And shrink all that into a single prayer, a single urge

And send that ingot out beyond the horizon

And see which god finds our message 

And won’t the response be interesting?

And can’t we learn a lot from that?

And still we can have our own power and dignity

And we don’t need to subscribe to anything beyond ourselves 

And perhaps one day we’ll call ourselves mystics

Clad in sacred lab coats with magical badges we’ll pat each other on the back

Singing songs of the Great City 

And how we used to be afraid

Of our choices, which were like small stones on a gameboard 

Before we discovered agape again in this millenia, discovered the laws of things

Oh faceless lord of laws and spirals: 

Make me strong in this my prayer to you

God of the Humankind

Of love

Glory to the cycle!