How could this happen? I keep playing it over and over. Is it possible for this to all just disappear? Please God, please.

Am I delusional when I see what Ive been asking over and over again? Is there some plan, some intricate design to all of this? Because when I saw what some person wrote, I started to wonder if God was listening.

But God is not listening. Because God does not exist. God is a construct we make and fall back on when we are feeling weak. This idea that we call God is the ideal of humanity, humanity at its pinnacle. I noticed it, she noticed it, and Frank noticed it. I live by reason, even the Bible says our hearts are deceiving.

Nature vs. Nurture

I thought for sure I could manage the explosions, they were, after all, mines I laid myself. Carried like newborns, cradled rather, like Christmas ornaments or glass China seconds away from shattering, I placed them all with careful consideration. These were mine, these buds of anger, cracking the dirt like seeds straining to see the sun. I sat back to watch, trembling. Have I sewn seeds of things I will grow to regret? When the time comes, will they explode in my hands as I struggle to find them before my enemies pass? Will I protect them once again? Or stand in silence, the proud owner of their wrongs; a machine they have created, their prodigy child, perfect replicas of their sin. Are we just patches of experience molded by the quick hands of lust, rage, gluttony, fear, negligence, and disgust? What of nature, what of innocence at birth? I'm not sovereign in my own body.

"I also have in my mind that seemingly wealthy, but most terribly impoverished class of all, who have accumulated dross, but know not how to use it, or get rid of it, and thus have forged their own golden or silver fetters."
-Thoreau

Rumbling like empty stomachs
Talking, begging questions, assuming induction
And criticizing logic derived from honest ache
This is not a God I plan to create

Come down to the washroom 

Breathe where you can find it 

Slap the words on your body 

World of caterpillar dances 

Hold your best friend like a newborn 

Through the trampoline living-room 

Euphoric quiet black doom 

Held over like a falling blanket 

Or a stream off a cliff 

Ever changing, rolling, released hips 

Smash together with addict violence 

Where the water falls, lift your head and swallow

Spin like spin like spin like carousels 

Kiss the animals that toss you 

Up and down, latchkey kids grown 

Hold on to the flight 

Its such a wonderful lucid night

It was a small cellar of sorts, a narrow passage divided in two by an oversized plastic shower curtain. The white reminded her of the hospital. She removed her clothes piece by piece, standing at last, slightly arched from the day spent huddled under florescent lights, her mind like a mitt ready to catch. She had found she enjoyed her compulsive studies above all other escapes, alcohol alike.  The dwindling of her sex drive was obvious; she spent her time sleeping when she used to crave the pleasure, the tickle of sex. She looked down at her body without opinion and rubbed the small of her back, pressing against the pain of early aging. She turned the knob in the shower to hear the sound of water, crisp as it hit the bottom. Hidden in her bag she found the instrument of the demons, used to weld a shrine to the evils in the world right there on her body.

She took off her shower shoes. She had never before felt the pit that drained the dirty water from her. All the diseases that crept there would catch instantly to their first host and she would close her eyes to feel the alternating pressures press against the thick skin on the bottom of her feet, and she would know for the first time what it felt like to catch a disease. She had to turn her face when she washed her arm, the smell of rusting metal made her sick with contempt. Would she grow old, she wondered. The constant stream of steaming water had numbed the back of her neck, and she had found how it felt when the dirt is too thick to wash off. 

Where I trade sin for pain 

Alleviate the social qualms and count to ten 

Gasp for air where I could've let it seep out

And tuck my head in my knees to wait it out

A caravan of calm voices and busy hands 

I know how to make it better but... 

A trade off so simple and easy to hide 

Makes sense like a pill that they'll force down 

But with certain aches and nauseous coughs 

They swear it trumps injury in ethical costs

Blue swells on my arms where I "ran into doors"

Im starting to wonder if this is really worth fighting for 

how many times can a man turn his head and pretend that he just doesn't see?

I am my brothers keeper. I will be my brothers keeper. 

It still haunts me, the way his arm fell off the couch like a rushing waterfall with no outlet to the sea that would, with time, become nothing but brittle cliffs. The subtle shallow breaths that lightened his lake a little every time, sighed slightly upon exhale when the pernicious odor leaked from his cracked lips. I am nothing to him. I am furniture that gets in the way. I am evidence left behind. With rage which has calloused my heart I can only imagine releasing upon him the same physical wreckage which he has laid upon us, emotionally. I want to let go, I want to hurt him more than I want to save him. 

When I start hitting him I cannot stop. The world turns black, I cannot see where I am steering the car. I end up half way off the road but I cannot stop. I am a demon, slave to the vengeance he has deemed funny until now, when the true horror of my inhuman heart tears manically at my own kin, my own brother. See what you have made?! I want to scream. But I don't. I say nothing. I grab hold of the wheel and throw the two of us back onto the street. 45 miles an hour, I am just like him. 

So narrow the glades of fastened acute
Pieces of swallows of childish repute
Endless and quaint, tallied and judged
Harshly upon wallows of cypher and aspen
Called upon as soldiers, drilled and re-designed
A picture so stolid and quickly defined
Sordid and peachy, insipid and kind
Not a bigot at all, a human body and mind
Coldly washed ashore the banks of south Maine
The frigged and careless garbage of crabs
The tiny parcels of beige and dense atom compounds
The fucking insanity of pierced heels and tattered toes
Eats at our body and fastidiously shows

The Way To Fly

This could be the bridge

May I be so bold to claim 

The dim lighting brewed bean smell 

That wrinkles in our faces hold it all 

The secret that formed constructs of religion 

The fettered wiggle free from grudges rope 

That with time and space 

The wrinkles again 

Which held for years await 

The darker deeper crests of weight and trial 

To the touch, softer than spikes recalled

And from demon eyes 

Rose human life in every form 

From malice, resentment, indignation

A child soldier 

From remorse, negligence, solitude

Widows of war 

From joy despite the soreness and ache 

The aged and illiterate 

The wrinkles, which examined closely enough 

Peer into the heart

The identity, though perceived at a time 

A monster as relentless as time itself 

Now only and simply a human form 

I am so sorry. 

this is no place for christian boys among us lost unsubtle girls 

we drink into the night and pass out on the bathroom floor 

and when the curtains all rise up youll find the scars of lucifer 

Im coated in the ash of brimstone but I swear it could be worse 

Everywhere I go I leave behind the poisons of this world 

My body falls limp in your arms, in a world all my own 

The bland of blurry eyes mold crosses into stop signs 

I'm sinking quickly into sleep - the lure that God designed 

i wont put up with this any longer

ill find a god who's not a ghost 

15 Things You Might Not Know About Me...

• The longest thing I've enjoyed doing is writing, seven years (but I secretly think I'm not very good at it)
• I never admitted my first love because he didn't love me and I knew he never would. It has been years and I still haven't really forgiven him for hurting me like he did.
• I think every uncle is a pedophile. And I have a hard time envisioning pedophiles as any other ethnicity except Caucasian. 
• I am jealous of Indians. 
• I am overly thankful for all my friends because when I was a child I was so overweight that I thought that I would have no friends in highschool and that no boys would like me and I would live alone the rest of my life. 
• I'm not scared of blood because of the night she bled on me. I'm scared of blood because of the time I didn't think it would stop coming from my own SI at 14.
• I saw my first unrelated penis at age 9 when my friend pulled up a porn webpage on our computer and told me it was funny. (She turned out to be a lesbian)
• My first 'C' in a class was in Bible. (I went to a Private Christian School in early elementary school)
• I feel like I am living a lie because my parents think I am a Christian but I'm agnostic. I can't tell them because they would be very upset by it. And I don't want to hurt them because I love them more than I can even explain. 
• I haven't spoken to my brother in 6 months, except in one letter to explain that I haven't forgiven him and that I was glad he found Jesus. 
• I am suspicious of every conservative.
• I wish Walt Whitman was not gay because his poetry turns me on. 
• I think city lights are just as beautiful as stars. (but not more)
• I'm in love right now. After almost 2 years I am still madly in love with him. (It is one of the greatest accomplishments of my life)
• I have many secrets I still can't tell. 

Sometimes I think that humanity is just a silly little constructed complex not unlike "society," or "civility," or "superiority." I often think that thought itself is just a reflex to the fiction of our individual reality - yet saying so presents the obvious contradiction. Yet in a strange way, I'm not sure you can explain the nonsensical with sense. And our existence is nonsensical, along with our thoughts, our concepts of reality, and certainly all intangibles. What really makes sense, in the realm of humanities 'humanness,' does not actually make any real sense. Our presence here on earth - whether it be by science or God - our constructs of social conduct, and our perceived emotions are enigmas fought over by various opinions in the world of scientist, philosophers, and anthropologist. 

Reality is only real because we make it that way. Reality begins in ones head, and plays out in an indifferent and unplanned world when we act as though it is so. It is our own lack of imagination that traps us into a "reality" we don't wish to be apart of. Though I can not say for sure, that would be speaking in absolutes (which I've heard one is never to do - which is yet another paradox). We make so very little sense. Slapping a ubiquitous perfect genie like paternal filler in the sky may be a readily available answer to our contradictions as a species but I find this explanation unsatisfying, and in general even more head spinning. Yet science, in all its intellectual trend and elicit sleek, does not proficiently explain the evolutionary benefit of altruism, morality, or emotion. 

Humanity and reality are simply concepts - and right now I understand neither.

That Which We Call A Rose By Any Other Name

To change a name, to morph shapes, letters; to twist semantics, to pry and bend and hammer at definitive syllables; to place vowels in their proper order - I have done these things to change one simple word marred by years of internal warfare and heartache, to weld the jagged edges and crescent moons into an opponent word so hideous in contrast, so heavy, even I, its Creator, could not have anticipated its influence. To call things by their right name. This connected the previously arbitrary blimps of hardly traceable disagreement between me and the religion I once claimed. Now I am one semi-circle, open to the ground beneath, curving inward and pouring downward on the right side until it drips into a single dot of embarrassing and self-proclaimed unbelief. In the bible-belt suburbia,  I have little time to toss my hands in the air in frustration before the protestant EMTs come rushing in to heal my scraped knee with morphine and a lobotomy. "I am a" meant nothing without "Christian" strapped to the end; when I walked away from "Christian," I walked away from the present, labeled it past, and carried the physiological shell of me into a Godless place I struggle to name "Reality," or "Hell." I am hesitant; changing a name changes everything.

Belief-O-Matic Quiz

1) Unitarian Universalism (100%)

2) Secular Humanism (97%)

3) Liberal Quakers (85%)

4) Neo-Pagan (74%)

5) Nontheist (73%)

6) Reform Judaism (67%)

7) Theravada Buddhism (67%)

8) Mainline to Liberal Christian Protestant (60%)

9) New Age (58%)

10) Bahai Faith (50%)

I'm a Single Cell on a Serpent's Tongue

When I came home, I stuffed it in my purse, to keep it hidden, to keep the cover close. I felt a little ashamed like I was 16 stealing my parents liquor again with the same regretful smug defiance. I know the words, "The God Delusion," would be a cherry on top of my negligent church attendance and my journey through the Qur'an, to them. I doubt they are willing to admit the assumed conclusion of this evidence, that I am no longer a Christian, but as their suspicion rises, I'm beginning to feel the sting of deception. 

I am in no way proud of my unbelief.

Im agnostic, btw.

WE

The rotting steal infrastructures, lines of rectangles and triangles screamed, crying at the passage of a quiet mass, solemn with 20/80 vision. We hear the dulled version through hours of foggy memory and swallows of cheap liquid poisons that burn our throat and churn our stomach. We move as a flock, as an entity shuffling our feet and tripping against the strings of nothing, as nothing smiles back. We are one, the unity of ten thousand tragedies, indifferent to us as they trudge along. We are dizzy from the madness that perpetuates with time and those quiet moments of solitude, though rare, often irreparable. We have one aim, one mind geared toward the three pleasures eminent enough to corrupt. We name them: God, love, and drugs. We name them magical realism, selfish satisfaction, and false sensation. We name them excuses not to think, immoral though admirable. One day we may name them petty, but not today.

The subway roars; our impatient anticipation transforms every clank and echoed footstep into a raging machine of transportation, eating the tracks as it comes our way - certain to remain its cycle long after we end ours. But our imagination fabricates sounds and it doesn't come for another five minute eternity. Flying underground we fail to determine the temperature of the current swooping us up with the weightlessness of feathers that form a wing. As we fall to our knees in suffocating laughter we feel the glare of solitary shadows, soldiers of the straight-edge, kings of condemnation. As if pressure diminishes in the pool of now vague sensation, our body melts into a misshapen cup, unable to hold substantial content without spilling all over your shirt. We are stains. We are the embarrassment of past mistakes still apparent to everyone, "Not so past," we laugh. We are a confused temporary agnostic, like everyone else. We are waiting for justification to believe in a God but we do not find it. We tried to fall in love but we stopped believing in it.

Today we admitted our disbelief to a surprisingly apathetic audience. We spoke with our trembling voice, the words advocates use to excite emotion, but we found them unconvincing. Our eyes filled with the tears we spent years building up, but the millstones pulled harder and the ocean was none-the-less drowning us. We almost lost our footing at the halting screech-stop of the iron beast, to the amusement of the annoyed wrinkled faces among us. To lose our faith, we feel aged; to lose our mind, we feel we never used it in the first place.

God. Sex. Drugs

In APenglish5 today we were discussing what is called a "level three question" which is basically an open ended question on philosophy that is derived from literary themes and situations. The question was (without references before)... What is faith?

My initial thought, my Freudian slip if you will, was "blind-belief." My conscious quickly took over however to tell me that it was a, "strong belief." Perhaps we should listen to our intuition more. The church teaches that faith should be without doubt but that doubt fortifies faith. My secret: I've never been without doubt. (And I don't think I ever want to be.)

My belief in God has slipped to the point that if you could see it as a line on a graph, I have recently slipped below the zero mark and lay somewhere close to the top, but just below. I feel I should almost say I have disbelief with doubts saying, "maybe God is real and maybe he does care", (the reverse of the last 6 years).

And tonight Ben, a Watershed employee I work with, came in to talk as he usually does. He told me all my music was about sex. I laughed and told him I went in weekly patterns of listening to music either about sex, drugs, or God. He told me this made since because they were the three most incredible feelings capable of humanity.

Suddenly, they all seemed on the same plane to me. That they are all just fixes for the emotionally strung-out and... weak hearted. I thought briefly then of the Buddhist ideology, of Hinduism, Christianity, Islam, Deism, ext and I wondered... is religion a hoax? Is this a drug we've come to accept? Is this an orgasm of entire fantasy? Is it a socially acceptable cop out into a utopia we are unable to achieve on earth?

It seems logic is above this. If I can rationalize my way out I wont be waiting around for the next fix - for Sunday night, for a high or a shot, for sexual attention. While one day I persue one, the next day I persue another waiting until God, drugs, or sex satisfies. In a small way they all do, but in the biggest way, they dont.

Good feelings currupt us - they are a lust we all search after. Does it matter which medium we satsify this hunger in? Is it really healthy to have faith? I am full of questions and scared of their answers. For the past six years religion has defined me, and suddenly, I don't know if God is real.