Spiritual Dysphoria

It was not unlike the prognosis of
body integrity identity disorder,
but I had to cut it off,
despite having invested so much of
myself
into growing that misplaced limb of
belief,
faith,
religion;
dogma being a limb grown hitherto
from within the womb.
But I had to remove it
before its
eschatological appendicitis.
And I understand why many people react
violently
to losing their religion,
just as they would losing a
leg
or arm
or even their head,
because it is an attack on the self,
a psychosomatic assault
which is registered as such in the
brain’s errant cauldron of
miswired nerves and biochemistry;
but I had to cut it off
after spending many years
in the frigid frostbite realms of Reason,
cauterizing the rotten wound with
merciless progress.
It was, after all, a
liability soon replaced
by a more efficient prosthetic.
Even so,
there are times when,
in the shadow of fight or flight circumstances,
I feel the irrational itch
of my
phantom limb
and wish to encode myself fully
into modernity’s machines,
finally liberating myself,
if only temporarily,
from superstition’s angsty, tingling
codex of nerves.
What is this errant sensation I feel
in the dark, fearful hours of life?
It is merely a nagging pop-up error
in my cerebral matrix
for hardwired software
long ago deleted.

Flannery O’Connor’s Faith

The Catholic faith for her was not as some butterfly
fluttering so lovely upon an easy breeze
while a rainbow arced in a clear blue sky
and cheerful birds sang among the trees—
it was being one-winged and tumbling, nearly killed
by a passing car that did not brake,
or half-smeared on God’s indifferent windshield
careless of however fragile or pretty the butterfly’s make;
it was the lepidopterist pinning it upon
cardboard and encasing it in garish glass
to display the grotesqueries of beauty cruelly gone
and the beauty of grotesqueries as they come to pass,
for her faith was of Testaments both Old and New,
and thus she believed that conviction meant sorrows and agony—
the butterfly caught in a spider’s web, a view
with which I, an atheist, happen to agree.

The Earthwalker

The tombstones arrayed in haphazard fashion
around the church, each headstone black with fungus,
as was the Madonna before whom the girl knelt in a passion
of prayer for her child not yet born among us.
A damp dew lay upon the grass that stained her knees
and the sky was overcast not unlike a vault in a crypt
and it refused to rain, or to shine, the distant trees
whispered in the hushed tones of judgment and gossip.
The church had existed for over two hundred years
and had been the place where many people came
to pray for hopes, and joys, and wrath, sorrows, and the fears
that are the natural heirlooms in Life’s two-faced game.
The stranger sat on the stone bench, not too far from her,
listening to her prayers, and the prayers through the centuries
which were like a bountiful crop whose yield from Summer
had not been harvested to serve in Winter’s ease.
The stranger wore a large trench coat, and a broad-rimmed hat,
and there seemed something odd about his figure and his airs
as he hunched over, watching the young mother while he sat:
so intent, so engaged in the girl’s desperate prayers.
Before she left, the young mother crossed herself again
and said three Hail Mary’s, her rosary clutched to her breast,
hoping the doctors were all wrong, that the child within
would bud and blossom, despite each ominous test.
The stranger, having heard all of her pleas, wove
the countless prayers of that church into her womb,
granting the child that untapped cornucopia trove
of lives and hopes and fears to help her bloom.
The sky remained overcast and neutral, the miracle seeded
without radiance, or thunder, or rain or birdsong,
for while she would be born, just as her mother pleaded,
she would be the heiress of neither good nor evil, nor right or wrong.
Her life would have joys and sorrows, love and loss,
and would be neither blessed nor cursed, but the same as all
who had come before her, offering their prayers to the cross
and hoping for reprieve, or being thankful, or answering the Call.
The stranger stood, then, and stretched his limbs of seven,
the trench coat cast aside and the angel wings spreading to fly—
though he could no longer fly to the luminous spheres of Heaven,
having been cast out eons ago as he gave to God a reply
so lukewarm as to his alliance that God raged and fumed
and smote him from Empyrean like a shooting star in fall
that struck the earth, a cast-out seed that therein bloomed,
granting to that desolate rock a lush, vibrant garden sprawl.
Neutral in the War of Heaven, and Neutral now upon the earth,
he could only grant the gift of Life, serving neither Heaven nor Hell,
being now the Earthwalker, the Waker, Janus, the Angel of Birth—
and whether he served good or evil, no one— not even God—could tell.