My weird God poetry. I read this at Diedrich’s and this lady asked for a copy. I gave her the one on hand cause I have it electronically. She saw me the next week and said she loved the poem, she read it to her therapist, and she “just stops and reads it every once and awhile” cause it makes her feel good. Now I find this kind of odd, but isn’t that what you read poetry for? To have your words mean something to somebody else? Isn’t that why we do these silly vanity pages/weblogs?
Well, God be praised, this one worked:
Thwack
——
I’m here to tell you that God does not exist.
I can say that with certainty because she told me.
I was sitting and breathing
a mantra of grace,
wrapped in silence,
Candle dancing,
incense curling upward.
I was thinking about how holy this moment was when,
THWACK!
God whacked me on the forehead and said:
“Please. This moment is no holier than any other.
No more holy than when you
brush your teeth
or pee
or change your oil.
The candle and incense
are a nice touch, though.
Is that patchouli I smell?”
She must have read my furrowed brow. Her tone softened:
“Look,” she said, “I appreciate all your efforts, really I do,
but you believers with your words and your truth and your
proofs of my existence are missing the point.
Concepts like “truth” and “proof” and “existence”
appeal to you only because your brains are so tiny.
You can’t hold my whole reality in your head at one time
and that frustrates you.
So you divide reality into little boxes
and label them with your words
and move them around
and fight over them
and try to organize them
in a way that makes you
*think* you can understand me.
Well, stop it! You can’t understand me!
Wake up and smell the patchouli!”
“Look, I don’t ‘exist’, but I am *real*.
And the best way to see that is to
drop all these boxes you cling to
and spill them out.
Instead of organizing reality
to fit into your little mind,
let reality organize itself
and then fit your little mind into *it*.”
“You see, all of reality is a big pattern —
a set of connections between smaller pieces of stuff,
and those smaller pieces are patterns of smaller stuff still.
You’re made of organs,
organs are made of cells,
cells are made of molecules,
molecules are made of atoms,
atoms are made of particulate matter,
ad infinitum.
Surprsingly enough, the matter doesn’t *matter*.
It’s the pattern,
the connections,
the “software,” so to speak,
that makes you you and not somebody else
or a cell in your body a kidney cell
and not a bone cell.
Connections are the only reality.
Without being connected, you don’t exist!”
“In fact, if I went away, everything would just collapse
into a little pile of quantum pixie dust.”
“What’s cool is that
I wove the instructions for everything
into the very fabric of everything.
My love, my truth, and my word exist
at all levels from the subatomic to the macrocosmic.
Your mind, my mind, and the mind of a flower
differ only in scale, not in kind.
I made you, and everything else, to be perfect!”
“Go ahead and study me if that helps you.
But all you have to do is be yourself
When you brush your teeth, or go to pee, or change your oil,
simply brush your teeth, pee, and change your oil
as I created you to do.
And do it without being so puffed up with vanity,
or confused by excessive desires,
and without being so obsessed with your little boxes.”
“That is the truest way to
love me
with your whole heart,
your whole mind,
and your whole soul.”
“Just be yourself and
let the me in you come out.
I know it’s harder than it sounds.
But I’m here for you.
Just call me.
You know the drill.”
Then she was gone. Silence.
So, I blew out the candle,
made some coffee,
and thought about changing my oil.