Poem: Not by merit

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It's not by merit
that I live.
By grace or by error -- not by right
I have what I have.

My worth
must be applied from outside --
rooted in the earth,
watered and fed

by one whose reflection
is what you see
when
you think you're seeing me --

the same one who shines
in you the same
way -- so we wear each other's reflections,
though we feel queasy inside them.

If we back away
from our being
kin -- if now we
seem bound by loathing,

that hatred
should in fact
be pointed
inward to the naked

self whose love
for you, that too
is of
the radiant one within you.

God's embodiment
is -- I don't know -- it is so humble,
so beautiful, so low -- I don't
know -- it is out of our control.

But how can people be
"hard to be with"
having the same being obscurely
underneath?

Such sickness in the news,
warmongers
so anxious
to break the mirrors

and deny that the God
who peers from an ugly face
might be their own God connected
to their own ugliness.

Suppose ugliness embraced
took on the semblance
of grace, suppose disgust
were self-directed violence,

suppose God not only was
but circulated
actively through the likes of us
unseen and unmerited,

would we change?
Would everything
become as strange
as our breathing?

If I woke would I give
you not my merit
but the real thing I have?
And would you accept it?

*

Poem: Proving God

*

When they challenged me to "prove"
my God I was struck by the oddness:
you prove something you don't have.
What you have you simply witness.

God seemed too basic to prove.
But if this was too clear to me
even to be labelled "if"
why did so many others disagree?

There had to be mediation.
We couldn't both be right.
Truth can only be one -- but the more one
it is, the more it feels remote.

My sense of truth was near
but confused, not that it was
but that I was, I suppose, there was a blur
pressed against my soul's moist glass,

something it was all too easy
to call my own desire
but what use could that be?
I longed not for myself but for another.

The world had only one will
that I could feel and it was not
my own but thrust like a staple through my soul
and was blunt yet I couldn't fathom it,

never quite managed to understand, couldn't
write it down as a to do and do it
because the need was so relentless and insistent
and all of me was fastened to it.

There was pain like a shovel
unearthing the old site
of our first warm bonding -- it still
held -- just barely -- but

could not be used
or redeemed in the day to day
bob and weave that passed
like a history in me.

My life was of little use
even to me but I held on-
to it "for dear life" and it was dear as it was
even to exist for not much reason,

praying
for change not
actually changing
so not doing it only wanting it,

as though what I want-
ed still
wasn't
attainable only thinkable.

But only thinkable? one thought
absorbed all my interest
because stakes so high were bound into it
there could be no other contest.

There was only one contest
and all else
lost its ambition to exist
if this one were false.

Goodness leaked
from our world at a rate
so unbraked
that even the measure had gone flat.

Most of my heroes were dead now
and my own soul seemed to hover
at this perilously low
caressing pressure.

I prayed for sheer prayer
craving an external
power
to erect my own will

and the sun shafted me
on a beam of hot fluff stronger
than the most sinewy
human architecture.

There I lay on a spear that was thrown
by but not decoupled
from intention.
And if it pushed it also pulled.

*