2009

Your Gods All Suck

I have worn your fezzes and your burqas and your yamulkes and your mitres
I have stood in your temples and your mosques and your synagogues and your cathedrals
Your oracles and your rec rooms and your board rooms and your bar rooms
I have studied in your upper rooms and sat on the floors of your fellowship halls
And rolled twenty-sided dice, listened to organ music, come abruptly and after a glorious duration
And I've read your poems and I've bullshitted with your dads and missed trains
To hear the ends of your graduation speeches with their quirky ice- breaking openers
And I have walked your dogs and listened to your secrets and taken your drugs
And tried your recipes and borrowed your shampoos and edited your articles
I've followed your blogs obsessively and donated blood and felt smug along with you
And felt smug without you and reasoned with your cynicism and felt desperately alone
Whenever you have revealed your absolute otherness which exists permanently
In these gods you unpack from your upbringing, your education, your stance
Vis a vis the slate layer cake of class, these gods who save you from anxiety
By delivering you in middle age to a mindless repetition which is not poetry and is not life
And which leads you always to fear, blind rage, and isolation, and leads me too,
Because your gods all suck, every last one leaves you spent and pale and not saying thank you,
Not feeling the motorcycle throbbing under your ass, not rolling into a tree the snow
Crinkling on your corduroys, not looking straight at the asshole that shits another year
Of incomprehension onto the lilies, not staying where we stand, but agreeing
To be destroyed, agreeing to pretend to reject everything but a champagne lollipop
Distributed by aspiring actors freezing in canyons, to reject happy senselessness
And senseless happiness and bonkers the camerata in its metronomic swingings
Of the bows of agreeing, even music even the way is a god that sucks, even the wrong word,
The pot and the poetry there are no hot hands there is no always-on. Suck suck suck
Not you not me your gods my gods these prolegs belief adheres to our spines
God almighty the suction the straightaway lying of checklists and watchtowers
And photographs by Marion Ettlinger, voting machines and neural plasticity,
There is no avoiding how bad your porn sucks, how little you know what you want of love,
And vice versa it of you, how every note of Chopin chisels a concordance in the basalt
That is devotion to a flower and a hive and the odds of finding royal jelly
And surviving the duel of the nurselings, your independence sucks, and your satire,
Every means to preserving an equidistant parody of fellow-feeling, pussy gods
And especially the mothergod pitying the undying crap of what fails to study,
Learning is a crap god, a Vishnu of because-I-said-so, and reason is a bullshit god,
Just as opposing reason is the eternal sucka, the ever-advancing army mistaking its iPod
For body armor and its heavy artillery for an explanation, and repetition is a fucked god,
A fucked god, a fucked god, repetition is a fucked god leaking poetry,
And everyone who reads this sura will continue to cling to theirfucked gods,
But there is no god who monopolizes love, and there is no love that anxiety cannot trouble,
And eventually and permanently there is at least five degrees above absolute zero of love
Everywhere except on earth where we keep seeking some evidence
That the larger part of the universe wants even more than we do to be pushed around
And to find these ghosts we make a colder space than has ever vibrated
Inside a water heater underground in Minnesota.



[This poem was funded in part by a grant from an anonymous donor.]