why bury sin?

I sit reading a favorite book

Wearing a pair of brown leather sandals

Whose worn, flat soles look

As if they’re as old as the bible.

Wearing a pair of faded blue jeans.

Wearing a checked blue-green flannel Pendleton shirt

Too old to contemplate.

Sickened of words like

Toxic,

Patriarchy,

Doubling down,

Fox News,

Rachel Maddow

Personifying possibilities

Of the threat and acceptance

Of being dominated by banalities.

Of therapists encouraged to indulge their ideologies

Rather than expanding the consciousness

Of others.

The ceramic and metallic blue coffee cup

Holds 1/3 of something

And 2/3 of nothing.

I’ve reached some sort of finish line.

Some sort of marker

Laid down by a center of Universe.

Mom died.

The loss of a tuning fork.

Signifier of an identity

That grew a multitude of identities,

Hurdles,

And joy.

Friends showed up for me

Through social media currencies

And banal identity politics.

It must have been uncomfortable

For some.

How can it not be

When someone mirrors pain?

Yet they did.

Gave me a bed to sleep in.

Let me take snorts

From large bottles of Bombay Gin

In the middle of virgin nights.

Allow me succor

Through phone lines

And

Knowing spaces of quietude.

Thank you for saying nothing.

I don’t care.

In my movie you were

John Wayne,

Jane Austin,

And Winnie the Pooh

Again and again and again

I want to come back

To the joys that sit with us now.

To everyone’s differing versions of unity.

To the liminal space

Where tear’s water roses,

Sails fill with God’s breath,

And French butter melts

Over heaping dollops

Of mashed potatoes

Speckled with green chives.

Why bury sin

When she’s our best friend?

I can’t brook a single center of Universe

When each center sits

In the spot where we stand.

I was succored by friends,

Succored by an old teacher who now

Walks tenderly with a cane.

Succored by the annoyances of those I love.