Jon

A delusional negro regarding my better nature.
One who simply needs a corrective lesson in the old philosophy of man against man.
A push here and an epithet there are all he needs to be cast out from my present company.
Yet he remains a stubborn and fixed point,
An outlier of outstretched brotherhood… one I cannot repay.
No Atlas Shrugged or stumped Thinker of solidarity,
He is faithful to Jew and Gentile cosmic posterity.

I am on a sinking continent of slipping cerebral paint.
Quiver, Quiver, and Cower from the Sun on High!
Or hold onto the fleeting image of transfiguration with swollen and bloodshot eyes!
Can my split soul be made whole from peering into the pool of another’s faith?
I fear Belle Isle tolls for me still.

Black and White

The kicked in door by a polished boot was at least pure.
Where a flag was planted on a broken corpse and printed in its blood.
There were no limp-wristed pretenses or mewling crocodile tears then.
It was some comfort that you might as well have shut up before you died.
Indeed, only the masculine are wielders of such rippling evil.

Jesus sounds like that kid at a glee club before an atomic wedgie…
But Beatitudes is strong stuff,
And God-fearing altruism before Hellfire is some Bruce Lee shit.
Homeland pride grafted onto faith is the word of a wolf,
Bear your cross and be consistent.

Beneath Humanity

In cracked concrete and servant’s squalor,
Or luxury apartment decadence.
The kind and right word to a friend,
Or the blackening descent of flexed contempt.
A marathoning pornographic puritan,
Or dripping tissues in wastebasket metal.
An eloquent appeal to the executioner of lit orbs,
Or the acceptance as vermin in eternity’s pit.
The heart remains vicious,
And movement is unchanged.

Jew

Maternal love not yet cleft apart from the womb.
Birth seems as the sea before crashing upon mortality’s shore.
A fractured identity molds as shame in a murmuring synagogue.
Knowing not the Lord’s language or a present patriarch.
Displacement and disappointment,
A minority of a minority.
The sins of a father pass with his child waiting under rainfall.
An orphan in New England’s modern misery,
Yet young Moses drifted downstream as God’s elect.

Six Feet

Sitting in a supermarket of sickness,
A waystation of fading men benched with honor.
Alone with asymmetrical despair,
As a spider darkening a white wall.
What to read about?
Kierkegaard or Earthworm Jim on the Sega Genesis?
Gazing at Google…
A meaningless search field punctuated by forgotten frivolities.
Flesh, wretched even to my own vision, is clinically massaged by a gloved hand.
“Well, you’re probably fine.”
“Get out.”

A Walk in the Park

Out of the car and its dirt-peppered cover of reality.

A collage of dying reds and yellows,
Designed to stoke sight in my darkened third eye.
Perhaps a feeling?
But a man's on the path.
He has invented traffic and is as unwanted as an accident.
Before him there was no other, now he'll need an ambulance.
A reminder that I suffer from another's very visage,
A melancholy I cannot mend.
The Narrow Way gives way,
And Pandemonium's port opens.

The Depraved Nature of a Church at Peace

"For where two or three gather in my name, there am I with them." This verse spoken by Jesus Christ, from the Book of Matthew, is a fine working definition of the church. You'll notice earlier in the same chapter, Jesus also tells his audience to point out the sins of a believer to the church if he should fail to listen. In our glossy modernity of iphone and ipad plastic, what is called the church is far too invested in gluttony to care about the sins of a parishioner, let alone their own.

If you ask a gay man in America what he thinks of the church, then you should already know the answer. If you don't, then you're a liar. It has been a bludgeon wielded against them. Effeminate attempts to claim that church has simply "been done wrong" misses the obvious conclusion. A brick and mortar church, that is as an institution, cannot exist in a land of peace and prosperity. It decays quickly into a spiritual cirrhosis.

The church as a city on a hill has only worked in times of persecution. This claim is easily demonstrable. The Black Church encumbered by chains gave strength to the voice that God was with them in the world of their present agony. The Confessing Church in Germany screamed out the Gospel as their lungs were choked from the smoke of human furnaces. It ought to go without saying that the Orthodox Church of both of these eras were firmly entrenched against the dignity of souls. The Southern Baptist Convention and Nazi "Positive Christianity" subsisted on political power and mere economic opportunism.

Once a church stops feeling the ache of every sinner's labored breath on this wretched planet is the moment I can and will tell it to go straight to Hell. Every church now, from the Catholics to the Anglicans, to the Russian Orthodox, to the smattering of tax-exempt American parasites, all of them are a monument to at least ineptitude... if not idolatry. Taking mission trips to vacation spots like Turkey, while the religion of their hometown smolders. Perhaps meeting as Christians in groups of two or three is preferable to tithing just so Liberty University can stump for the president. To many, it might be that the church is reduced to a piece of gothic architecture and a few funny hats.

The modern ecstasy-like concoction of church group-think has deluded us into thinking that faith is something other than a personal struggle. Faith never leaves the subjective. Attempts have been made otherwise, and from them have all come shameful notions. The yawn inducing yes-men of apologetics have failed and will surely continue to fail with their overt intent of making belief more palatable to the businessman born without want. One can get no further than finding God in oppressive silence.