at the end of your ten day meditation retreat you got in your car drove 30 peaceful feet and ran over a bird splayed its holy guts on the pavement like god fingerpainting fuck you across that deep breath you were holding the way your mother held her first born you thank goodness were torn from the bible the day before they burned it for that verse about dancing to tambourines once you saw the blood of christ on a knife carving redwood trees into church pews now every sunday morning you hear glaciers melting and you cry easy as a one night stand never ever is when you see the feathers in your rearview mirror scattering like prayers searching for a safe place to land hold me to my word when i tell you i will leave today catch a bus ticket west just to stand in the center of that highway stopping traffic till every feather s answered i ve seen too many prayers caught in the grills of 18 wheelers and folks like us we ve got shoulder blades that rust in the rain but they re still g sharp whenever our spinal cords are tuned to the key of redemption so go ahead world pick us to make things better we ve been building a bridge through the center of this song since mother teresa replaced the walls of her church with the weeping cries of calcutta s orphaned ghettos you wanna know what the right wing never got we never question the existence of god what we question is his bulldozer turning palestine into a gas chamber what we question is the manger in macy s and the sweat shops our children call the north pole what we question is a burka hiding 60 swollen lashes on the back of a woman found guilty of the crime of allowing herself to be brutally raped what we question is the idea of heaven having gates silly have you never stood on the end of a pier watching the moon live up to her name have you never looked into the eyes of a thief and seen his children s hungry bellies some days my heart beats so fast my rib cage sounds like a fucking railroad track and my breath is a train i just can t catch so when my friends go filling their lungs with yes when they re peeling off their armor and falling like snowflakes on your holy tongue god collect the feathers we are thick skin covering nothing but wishbones break in you ll find notebooks full of jawlines we wrote to religion s clenched fist yeah we bruise easy but the sound of our bouncing back is a grand canyon full of choir claps and our five pointed stars have always been open to the answer whatever it is i know david argued with the chisel i know he said make me softer when those tourists come looking for a hero i want the rain to puddle in my pores build me holy like that build me a kite flown out a bedroom window at midnight the day freedom set its curfew to 9 11 my heaven is a snowglobe the blizzard will always be worth the touch of a hand shaking me awake like a boy taking deep breaths all the way down to the dents in his shins like he s building a telephone from a string and two tin cans he knows god s number by heart he knows it isn t listed in any book look me in the bullseye in the laws i broke and the promises i didn t in the batteries i found when the lights went out and the prayers i found when the brakes did too i got this moment and no idea how it will end but every second of this life is scripture and to know that trust me we don t need to be born again
['slam poetry']