The Hairy Cross That Bears Itself

Audio

God and I broke up when I was eleven;
I didn’t like the way he talked to me.
Religion is the curse
laid on the living
by the dead.

So now it’s just me,
a puddle of pink shivers
laughed at by skulls,

and I flatten my ape hand
against mindless light
and watch blood feed flesh
through an aging machine
that built itself
and generated me
to pilot it,
its blueprints
encrypted in every cell,
DNA a four-letter word
scripted by a unifying explosion
inside a birth engine
whose own genes were born
through countless perishings
in a manifold lineage
in which every dictator,
lion and portobello,
linden and paramecium,
is my distant relative,
in the all-embracing
and self-braiding
planetary
fractal of life
among whose 
billion-year branches
I’m just another tip
yearning through my excerpt,
every shooting second
slamming shut 
behind me.

Eternity expired;
now time is a landscape
through which I bear the hairy cross
of my body, wagging my fist
at the bureaucratic sky,
begging nobody 
for one 
more

day.

The light sways,
frilling out like a cosmic king’s
shroud.

Every honeydew morning is stolen
from the saliva-jeweled jaws of death,

and the sparrows sing hallelujah,

and there isn’t even anybody
to thank.