Maybe it’s time you had another argument with God.
How many school years, Augusts, seasons, instants
have stumbled by since you collapsed your body
onto the wooden floor that afternoon, bent by grace,
when you jolted two hands together
and confessed how sweaty and strange they felt
palm-to-palm;
when you plunged your radio chord into the wall
and let music which had a heartbeat
cleanse your blood for two hours straight
as a hurricane of questions tore from your lips?
How long has it been since you did something
so spontaneous, so beautiful, so filled to the brim
with light?

Maybe now’s the moment I begin to admit
the number of sins
I wasted trying to fix, the days between then and now
I spent in a corpse kneeling before paper
because in all honesty, why this deadness.
All one really needs to understand is symbolism.
One time, I had a dream in which a pastor on tv
told me the Cross represents leaping off a three-story
apartment building and being jerked back
by the bright hospital light slicing into his vision,
that baptism is the murmur of left-over faucet water
dripping its final drops into the kitchen sink at 2 am.
Being saved means erupting into a rage
after 365 days of solid rain, spiraling back
from that abyss of holy water which stung like acid
and broke the skin of healing I had knit around myself.
Then the buildings steady, faces clear,
enter the sounds of crying and laughter and white
scintillating light.