PostPoems Be Artistic. Be Creative. Be Inspired!

it's 9:00 on a sunday

instead of being home with my beloved pop-tarts and my netflix and my homework that I wouldn't be doing anyway

i sit in a church with cheery painted-glass windows depicting sad stories with the sunny, smiling faces of saints

and thousands of baby blue flowers, cut from the ground they once breathed in, gathered into massacred bunches and shoved into bright, happy pots and littered about the altar

and the grand centerpiece, hanging from the ceiling, a giant statue of a broken, bleeding man with dead eyes and no pupils, with nails piercing his wrists and the tops of his feet

his head hanging as if in defeat

his face depicting a story i've heard a thousand times but i've never really understood

but today i decide i'd like to understand (pause)

so i sit in one of these long polished wooden pews, with the back of an envelope and a golf pencil in my hands

and i listen, as if i'm in class again, just taking notes

but instead of answers,

all i hear is the sniffling of old women with musty embroidered handkerchiefs

and the wailing of children that aren't smart enough yet to shut up and listen to jesus

and the heavy breathing, the heaving of the old holy man on the stage into a hidden microphone in his crisp white collar when he's run out of things to bash his congregation for

and i don't hear the answers to any of my questions like

what the hell am I even doing on this earth and

where is my money going after i toss it into these little golden dog bowls

and most importantly,

who the hell is god and what gives him the right to make me feel like nothing more than a sack of filth waiting for hellfire to consume me

No! the heavy-breathing man with the microphone doesn't tell me how to love myself

he doesn't tell me how to feel loved in any way

he just tells me that what i do is wrong and that i don't deserve love, and i'm lucky enough to get it at all

so instead of being joyful and spreading the good news of the lord like he orders me to i go home and bury myself under a quilt stitched together with thousands of tiny, heavy memories

i keep all my sins in a bottle around my neck and wait for a calendar date to spill them out onto the floor in front of a priest in a purple robe who doesn't even know my name

or otherwise i just flip the cork off the bottle and drink down the sin myself

Stomach empty, fasting on nothing more than the wine of my guilt

the wine the priest calls God's own blood but I know, I know it came out of a bottle

and I don't see the difference between that bottle and the one that made a man beat his wife the Saturday night before

and I don't see why if I just drank enough of this holy blood I wouldn't get drunk enough to become a sinner

but these questions don't matter because

unlike a classroom or some kind of seminar

the priest doesn't pause at the end of his lecture and ask his audience if they have any questions

and even if i were to raise my hand the congregation would probably assume i was just trying to reach up and touch the statue of the crucifix above me

and in a way, i am

because maybe if i could just touch him

maybe if i could just look close enough at his eyes that i could see some semblance of a thought or a dream or even just a pupil

i would learn the answers to all the noisy unattended questions rattling around in my ribcage

or at the very least i would learn to

shut up

and paint my eyes as stained glass windows with watercolor paints made of dyed teardrops and false happiness

and drink my wine until i'm drunk enough to forget the sins around my neck,

like a good Catholic would do.