jude price

Reverend of religious naturalism

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I gave you all this

And still you took

my life.

And worse, still I would forgive you.

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Eudaimonia

The wind is river water in my hair

pulling through it with a cold current.

I am floating there in the air,

suspended in the land sea-

wet enough to drown me,

I choke on it, all bug-eyed and tearful.

Chairs fill and empty and fill and empty

around me.

Plastic flesh melts off metal frames–

the anthropocene's leftover bones.

The world has been

ending

for as long as I can remember.

I choke on it.

You could not step

in the same river twice.

You could not stay it's flow,

you could not be the same.

You could not change it's course,

only stand in it's way.

The wind is river water in my hair

it is the prelude of my drowning.

The wind is river water in my hair

it is cool and blessed, it is living.

Though it is a promise of demise, I know

where there is life, beauty also lies.

There is life

in the erratic and fearful suffocation.

There is beauty even in the midst of suffering,

it can be caught with careful hands

in the space between blades of grass

and stars and us,

in our own dignity and dedication, and

in the times it hurts a little less.

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Grasshopper

You are alive,

squirming in my hand

like a dissatisfied infant

or a fish searching for water.

You are alive, we are alive.

There is something the same in us-

some spark undefinable,

except by contrast to its cold absence: death.

You have a mind and survival instincts

and stoic eyes like a sixth sense I cannot recognize.

The quiet of the dissection room

is heavy like the quiet of a tomb.

You would not understand my apology

and are too young yet to sing,

as I damn you to this silence eternally.

What is the gentlest way to end a life?

Oh certainly not this.

And which thought is more sickening

that God will not forgive this small act of killing

or that He deem it no sin in need of forgiving?

You were alive in my hands.

I am alive, you were alive.

You were in my hand.

Now everything should be different,

but life is so fragile and commonly broken

that everything keeps moving.

Like Cain, like Ivan, I keep moving

because life is for the living, for the killers,

for the things that bite

wandering the earth until they too are bitten.

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The mother and daughter 

are a horrible recursive parable.

They were one creature once

which makes terrible wretched sense 

of the unfathomable depths of love and hatred

within her, then between them, now within her.

The mother and daughter are pieces of the great faceless monolith: Woman,

who stands stoic and volcanic at the beginning of time.

The self becoming the selves on and on ,

matrilineal fragments like mirrors,

breaking, falling, twisting,

reflecting forever between them the loathing 

of what she let become her. 

Of what she is 

of what she is not.

Mother and daughter are one,

one so often strange and unpredictable to itself.

Punishing itself eternally in this domain of raining glass and ricochet 

shining like a head injury, like stars exploding in her vision,

shining like the deadly glint of a knife fight in the night.

Like violence and despair.

I am the thing that wounds me

I am the thing that cradles me.

The turmoil rending this flesh ,

eviscerating it from the inside,

is the betrayal,

the guilt and the grudge, 

refracting sporadically within me, between us, within her.

The path to healing 

begins with an end of punishment.

It begins with disbelieving the voice of deserving 

it begins with the death of resentment.

The path to peace is one of differentiation and self determination.

You have to be a person,

you have to be your own,

you have to trust yourself

Before anything else.

Connect to something other than the ancient sorrow you were born to.

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My body is an engine of entropy, expending energy to ensure my atoms arrange in organized patterns suitable to life and thought, while emitting an exhaust of chaos. Thereby perpetuating my own complexity at the cost of accelerating the loss of order in my surroundings. The laws of thermo dynamics may be inviolate but they are malleable as we bend the topology of its plane such that entropy pools or flows accordingly with our existence. The level of cell organization it takes to have this thought requires such a bending of these laws.

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The black hearted sisterhood 

of difficult women, 

of difficult things to love.

Of deep feelers,

of vengeance seekers,

of impure creatures.

Reacting like wild animals,

Always reacting.

The scorned, the hateful, the frightened.

The black hearted sisterhood

of survivors. 

unbreaking, relentless, 

and all sharp edges.

We know what we are.

Often guilty, rarely sorry.

What apology can be offered

for what we are?

What apology should be offered 

for what we were made?

What apology is there 

for what we've always been?

The black hearted sisterhood 

subsists on will and wound.

They do not need you,

they do not need to be good,

respected, loved, forgiven.

They want these things,

but they cannot need them

and rarely have them. 

We know what we are.

Not kind or pleasing or deserving.

Unpleasant, unrepentant, inconsiderate.

Volatile. Childish, impudent.

Prideful, unwilling to swallow down 

the everyday indignities of being 

some lesser thing.

Unable to quell the burning 

lit fuses on incendiary feelings.

Ineffable momentum barrelling us through 

the unending cycle of biting and being bitten.

I know what I am.

Chaotic and cautionary.

I know what I am,

I know I must be it 

alone

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Drawing in ink.

I dream of driving, like many of us do.

I fantasize of a great mind and wisdom,

of vision and intention and presence,

well dressed words and effortless confidence.

I hold in my mind this image of excellence,

concise in it's wholeness and ambitions,

my fingertips burn over its edges.

I dream of driving, but the brakes are broken.

I spin stories of subtle tragedies and sacred wounds,

martyrs and honor and meaning,

indomitable souls unbroken under unrelenting onslaught.

I tell tales taller than God, I imagine men immovable.

Retroactively assigning plotlines to chaos

for the sake of satisfaction,

It soothes the cold truth of disarray.

I dream of driving. I dream.

My body unmoving, my mind roams free

Escaping infinitely into new and different versions of everything.

But shadows will always lurk in the creases of reality.

What we *are* is necessarily less than the sum of what we *could* be.

Any choice ever made is more loss than gain,

More possibilities erased than the one obtained.

It feels like a cruel design, time and being.

I dream of driving, and find the unbound sky horrifying.

A thimble couldn't hold an ocean, I cannot contain any more multitudes,

nor any more grief for the unmade fates.

But each great sacrifice dictates an invaluable price upon what remains.

Guaranteeing the immense weight of the decisions we make.

The stark lines against blank page are beautiful.

Not optimal, not without mess and mistake

But drawn in ink, we are more lovely than a blank sheet full of potential.

I awake.

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I keep the night and she keeps me,

But she is all that keeps me.

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When love sweeps you off your feet, it is not to be carried away sweetly. It is the rug being pulled out from under you, it is understanding that everyone else has been living in idioms and you have been truthful.

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I am playing this game

daring myself to be better,

more honest, softer.

I am bearing my neck

In all my pathetic truth.

Because that is the trick to it,

The trick to being seen

is to stop hiding.

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Shade shifting across the floor parallels the sun. Without you moving, your shadow does. Twists violently, writhing and contorting with flat dimension as the bus turns. The shadow you cast is burning and graceless, It is in the nature of changing As you have.

Now that you hold no faith in perfect justice, the illusion of defect and autonomy defeated, Now that you do not harbor that jagged sense of deserving; when the world turns its vitriol upon you you are angry with the force of all the time you spent sorry instead. livid to ash and bloodless at the speed with which it catches up inside your body.

Rage has become me Burning kindness out.

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Binoculars

Two eyepieces too wide set,

depth perception will have to be cut

for sight.

Makes foresight abstruse

The true distance indecipherable.

Couldn't care less. Eyes only for

the skittish animal, having grown

to a loveable size.

This way looks light

that way looks lithe

all together wild and vivid.

Nearly life size, like reaching

hands would come back

full of feathers.

Reaching hands only came back

empty.

The winds are cruel and the world is angry.

And little birds only live at the mercy

Of their hammering hearts.

Little birds fly away,

Fly away at the first step you take.

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Exotic

Flower of a foreign house, fragile as a dream. Beauty born of unfamiliarity, novelty warding off scrutiny. To her the soil, the sky, the fingers, are exotic and lovely.

Tempted twitch the hands eager to prove they're damned to evidence their desolation, to show off their virulence. Stayed only by remorse and implacable shadow of shame.

Flower of a foreign house, fragile as a hope. Could be crushed in the palm Like so much dust. For softness and unabashed brilliance, for the audacity of color and kindness.

Tempted twitch the hands burning like fire. They break things it is all they have ever managed. It is not even volition when petals scatter in the wind,

it is prophecy.

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Boots

What is there to be except loyal? Antigone, your brother was a traitor. But you are not.

When the soul of one grows worn, The other is not immune. One lost is useless two. No matter how many miles walked Distance cannot triumph.

Your father's anger, the color of your mother's hair. Chiral like a mirror. Identical and simultaneously Irreparable in difference.

There is no love lost, There could be none gained. Agape is a promise of pain The pain of having only trumped by its loss.

Antigone, your brother is your brother. You bury him as such.

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Shephard Tone

One of these days. One of these days. Eventually all things must manifest, eventually. But there is no recognition in a hungry man's eyes stamped out and starved. Anytime now. Gotta be anytime now. We are on the edge of something. Large and overhead, We are surrounded by it. The tip of the tongue, the tipping point. event horizon. How much discovering do you demand? How much can you understand? Soon. Soon the great something will be unwound, the precipice unbound, the long-standing stricture lapsed.

But the infant is only an infant.

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what you had | what will always remain. your face is the same | you are stained like glass. Could be art if things were differently arranged. Instead pieces deconstruct into sharp dust under step.

you are the one moving | they are the ones that left. the backpack under your head | the shoes your mother bought all filled up with sentimental rocks, mortifying devotion in each ruination. The heft of stones nearly like a touch.

the running cannot stop | the hiding isn't enough the truth and the emotion will catch up | the lights reflect, the cameras flash elusive animal, exposed, examined, trapped at last. the inscrutable design collapsed with one well-lit look.

the shame of being a child | the shame of growing up the weight of it all in hand | the solitude of the empty air collision of contradictions, bend, break, impact there is no gentle way this story ends.

The End comes bearing the gift of lethe.