First Reformed
(Based on the Paul Schrader film with Ethan Hawke.
Written in the voice of the Pastor.)
I lament my deficit of prayer
Instead I speak to God
Let the shape of words fill a journal
Everyday without Mercy
Until my conscience burns all traces of these pleadings
I fill the air everyday with a clutching honesty
And call a pride into your house
That damns the floodlight of my prayers
Before the waves of sorrow reach the Beachhead
Where my immature vision of God’s power lives
The sinew of grief weaves around my heart
With a wrenching tearing of skin
Where blood issues my nihilistic embrace
A pouring out of denial and love wedded
And hung from a scaffold
Shielding me from God’s urgency
I am wrapped and tied in the coils of rose-wire
Lynching my conscious image of the Divine
Releasing my demons of despair
That masquerade as a calling to God’s work
Those mysterious renegade actors
Spawned by my own inner rebellion
Ambassadors of ego’s reach
Fomenting the external shape of inner landscapes
The apocalyptic upheaval
Lancing ripe expressions of desperate prayer
Embryonic yearnings for God’s help
Before steam grows and marches
Yet God knows all my alibis
You see death where I claim emergent life
Where hypocrisy cries out a forlorn flame
Where we both float on a new ether of hopelessness
Together
And my nature comes as obscure gifts
Where giving is self-destruction
And death is all around me
Wincing all night into the maze
Of the bottle magnifying the steeple and cross
Only to raise a bare hand and hold God back
Tears from the past roll up in time
To reach your fountain
And in the end
I kiss your flesh with unconscious weakness
While the spiritual in me staggers off
Into yet another abyss before the church
Before my son
And before all shortcomings
That place me in your arms
Rising together into a new dimension
Away from God’s influence
Away from faith
Merging into only Earthly love
And this love despises the Earth
As Death is everywhere
In everything I touch
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