I

I tried to write
about Sylvia Plath.
A mangled
effigy, like so many,
and near the end,
I wrote:

"I will lift myself high,
with my body, as my body,
and pray searing love holds my words
if I drop."

As if poets carry wands.
As if this pen is my
salvation plan.
What a shame, because
I think it is.

The dog's upstairs, and he might need me,
but I'll stay in bed.
I have unfinished business
with my dreams.
If I can't dream,
I have something to settle
with my thoughts.
If I can't think,
I have time to wrestle
with God.

II

I once saw love
as a pill bug, running
against the hardwood.
I crushed love, not
out of fear, or rage,
or religion, but out of
a child's eyes. 
A child
who burns matches right
under paper, who
dreams of God
under their pillow, and
who does not see how
life will spill its guts
into their eyes and mouth and
soul.
A child who is
strange and cold, knowing in that hidden way
what's coming. Adolescence
as one room, one occulted room
as adolescence.
A child
without permission
to crush bugs simply
to exist in that room
alone.

III

Today, I took a picture of myself and
cried. My laptop
couldn't load the photo, and
my face was torn up in
webcam static.
But I knew it was me
looking at that screen, reminding
myself of myself.

The toy poodle is asleep, 
having expended himself
on fearless adventure
and fear of abandonment.
He was on the grass, in the sun, and
in the glimmer of his
short white curls, I could see
how much reality was in
the yapping dog
I led back to our yard.

A day ago, the rottweiler,
big and tan, five-years wise and still
a kid, watched me collapse
into my oxblood heap, babbling
the same question:
"Does love break through?"
Then, in one of my
deranged turns, another question
to the dog:
"Are you love?"
Sensing my distress, without
any recognition of my words,
he placed a paw on my hand.
Then a rustle outside
from a squirrel or a rabbit
threw love's attention
elsewhere.

IV

I'm waking up in my
prophetic stew. I dreamt
about buttoning-up and
heading to church, leaving
the sin I've lived in.
When I was young, I was told
God's the thunder of judgement,
the flaming eyes, and the
burnt-up world.
Now if (when) I raise my white flag
and roll over for white-blood
religion, I fear
that flame will melt me away, and everything
I've loved and tried to love
will writhe and die before the Lord.

So I'm trying
something else.
Praying that God can be
the whisper
instead of the thunder.
Looking for him in every
dog fed and
pill left unswallowed.
Worshipping by
watching the uneven grass, the spindly trees,
and searching for the hands
I must be held in.
And the Lord may loathe
all my contradictions, my
inversions of love, hobbling along
the bedeviled earth.
And he'll have a time for me, a sinner
in his cup.

But right now, the rain brings a fog
ghosting up the window, a veil only broken
by drops and trails of water, forming substanceless
flowers.
The trees are cast in gray-green shades
upon a cloudy backdrop, like spider webs
in a cement basement, each bearing a thousand fists
of silk wound around the martyrs.

The scene takes me, and I fear
a little less.