poem

 Poem #45

Do you know that feeling when you finish a poem and you think you may have busted out a banger and it’s cool as hell for a while, you're proud of yourself, you finally did it, you may have made something original and halfway decent for once, something someone else will read and perhaps be moved. But after a few weeks you start to waver. You lose confidence. Was it really any good? Sometimes you never read it again. Afraid to find out it really is shit. You missed the mark and there’s no quick fix. This is what happened to God. He isn’t dead. He made the world as a beautiful poem and then started to lose faith in it. He lost the thread. Couldn’t wend all the disparate parts back together. So he moved on to something else. Abandoned us, in a way. It’s his nature. He has to write Himself into being. And if the lines we’ve inspired falter He has to find the words from somewhere else. He hasn’t forgotten us. He remembers there’s a poem buried somewhere in His stacks called “the rise and fall of man” or some shit title he slapped on it last minute. This occasional flicker of memory nags at Him. It stings. But He’s already engrossed in another project.  A fresh start. Another chance to get it right.  He can’t go back and revise us. It’s too late. His discomfiture with an unfinished poem ripples through the universe and manifests in our stanzas as nostalgia for the past, as the experience of loss, of your heart sinking to the bottom of a black sea, a heart that would rather fall through the ocean’s floor than ascend again to the surface. This is all He can do to keep the poem alive.  At some point perhaps He will gather all his writings into a Collected Works. Reading straight through will be the journey of eternity but by the end it will all make sense even as it peripatetically circles around (again and again) back to the beginning, to the time before anyone ever asked why.  One universe will explain the rest. Each answer will give rise to another question.  Ad infinitum. Which then are all collected into the One from which they came. Until then, just as the singing has to end for there to be a song, new poems keep getting written and written and written until we run out of things to say. When that happens all our voices will coalesce into a single tone that becomes a note in the melody of a larger tune that goes on and on as long as God keeps listening.

2/20/23