Words for Guns

May we please mandate a cease and no-more-speak of Adult Teeth. The term is a crafty deception…well a rogue to avoid confrontational speaking to be more precise.

Is it too much to just stare down at the child, holding a tooth in his hand, puddled in a mouth-blended concoction of spit and blood, that now is the waiting time for the Last Teeth. There are no more real teeth after these wider, brighter ones. Sure there are fakeries of invention but these are the last teeth the body will make. 

Finality is a terrifying thought for a child, or maybe it is for everyone.

Your lungs fill with the air He created, so praise Him as he created us to do.

The touch of God makes your body light. The fingers impersonate the loss of blood as you float. You can taste, feel, and see everything that’s going on — nothing is forgotten, it just doesn’t matter. All the sensations that were so familiar are now an alien to your own understanding, that’s how I  came to clench the notion. 

You are His prize to show off, to shine. You are His glory.

It feels like being in a bubble as if the ground was constructed anew, more of changing shapes than a solid surface for mass. I told my brother this and he said anything worth anything makes you feel like you’re in a bubble. Last week he got arrested.

Maybe we aren’t meant for God to handle us. Maybe we are too fragile from being so low, so far away for so long. When James fell to the ground he looked like an elevator that had its chords cut. His legs suddenly forgot how to hold weight. The youth room’s aged carpet was no match for his large build. James left a mark. I could see it when he began rolling on the floor chanting and laughing in all of heaven’s voices.

Terri fell. Three members of the varsity basketball team fell. 

My lungs became sore as I as my exhales became voiceless screams.

I felt the speaker’s hand tap my forehead as he hushed a verse and a declaration into my ear. His hands were wrinkled and dry as a desert that had no watery gulf hidden inside. His words were older than his cracking smile and expansive forehead.

A few more fell, making high pitched noises that muted their collision.

He wants to take you from all the pain of this world, but only if you’re willing.

One person just recited the promise as a spell. “Where two or more are gathered I will be there.” He repeated it with an urgency, like he was actually running after God but was four steps too slow to ever catch up. 

“Where two or more are gathered I will be there.” He raised his hands higher, he shifted his feet, he stretched his hands out in hope of the spiritual embrace. Eventually he fell. 

In the back the leaders stood. Two by a board as three were runners to make sure no was hurt by the trip and shove of the divine. Slashes got added to the board with each student considered to be in the spirit.

“This is the best Wednesday night service we’ve ever had,” one leader said. “I told Pastor Steven we didn’t need a big production video, just God.”

The other one said nothing, his eyes were hazed to the sight of so many on their back, caressing the air above them.  

My column From Pastor to Bastard has a new home, a home I once worked as editor but now I inject with a column on living faithless as someone who used to hold a deity so close. Purge ATL is the new home.

This, and the next two installments will be transposed from their original home at Atlanta is Burning. 

My head grows itchy and my nerves wind up as I wait to begin publishing the next columns. My notepad is filled with ideas crossed out on where the words will go. 

A law passed based on an interpretive, hand-me-down morality does nothing to validate the source of the belief system. It does not make a god real. It does not make the tethered words of sheep farmers into inspired dictations from a world creator. In fact it does the opposite. Yesterday sixty-one percent of the state with the fifth worst unemployment rate proved that they in fact do not hold faith in their own god and the tenants of morality they cling to.

I said it once as a pastor and i’ll say it now as a non-theist but voting as a christian only dismantles christianity, piece-by-piece, clause-by-clause, it all falls down and everyone can see there is no emperor to even clothe.

Using a random search of social networks for a quote I pull this much reverberated statement as an example: 

“I am SO THANKFUL Amendment 1 passed!!!! So Glad that Christians came out to vote for what God would have wanted!!!!”

But this right here is where the cracks in this person’s faith is. By taking their view of god and their own religion and forcing it onto others they have in fact said “God we don’t need you” because this mandate is a declaration through action that there is no judgment after death. 

A dude marries a dude and a lady marries a lady. Does it make a person’s bible not real? No. But if you believe that such love sends the two people into a fiery abyss after their heart stops then what those people do shouldn’t matter, because your god is all powerful and doesn’t need humanity to play god.

A side note: why is it when the dirty work must be declared it’s always god who controlled reality to bring suffering and hurt. No one ever thanks jesus for these types of things. Jesus always gets the saved life thumbs up, never the celebratory shouts to oppress others. 

I went outside and grabbed a shovel. I pierced the tender sham steal trashcans lined up by the bar. You stood inside wondering where I had gone. Bathroom. Outside. Cathartic.

That night I slept in the bed of your truck. I really felt like you were smoking all night on the building’s roof. I couldn’t tell. I saw smoke climbing when I looked up but I never heard your laugh.

Right now there is a naked old man. He’s breathing heavy but not sweating, like slow strokes that bare craving results, though in the coming hours before digression his body will flood.

His skin scratches the couch — its fabric still tight despite twenty years of human fat rubbed, pressed, and flattened over its domain. A great purchase, no one can contest that.

His cocaine is lined up on the table, ready for delight. His first smile of the day impersonates his last.

Naked. Shaking. Engulfing with a straw that seemingly is a ghost limb to his face. He’ll probably be dead soon but know this: he probably knows more than you’ll ever care. He also might not know a thing. 

“I’ll tell you when I die,” he once said to a child. He left his degraded car resting in traffic just to let a little girl who walked out from a playground know where she stood.

The child’s body stayed in time but her face silted as his — a barbed wire gnaw around the eyes. “What’s not fading is already dead,” he answered the enjoined yells and honks from the road. 

The sterile smell of an ER are the acts of desperation. They match the eyes of the ones you love.