Postlapsarian (The Weeping Stoic)

I.
Disillusionment suctions calloused feet into prelapsarian sludge. Previously, it had been a summer solstice ocean, or at least an equinox—some waves of yin some waves of yang. But Something in a Moirai robe (who even is he?) clobbers out winter winds, glacializing home.

Flexed biceps, up-turned chins, emphasized butt and breasts, clenched fists all thrash towards post-Edenic coastlines, but you crave to burn that Tree. Old Eden snags against nomadic projection—snags at the pinky toe, which is oh, still so resiliently sensitive! It begs the question of on a scale from Hamlet to Othello—how certain are you (Yes, it’s a trick question.)?

II.
Some proclaim God scheduled for me to become an amphibian, then finally a warm-blooded mammal, but yet they don’t believe in the intimacy of evolution (so his hands grip the world but his fingers can’t touch the people inside?). No. I’m not a poisonous sea-monster to be tamed. I’m a wingless, frenzied bird in desperate need of prosthetics. A god who has to compress the entire world upon me until I’m triturated in order to love me is not God. My God has more faculty than the Moirai of disillusionment. 

These proto-Calvinists don’t comprehend maybe God can touch the nomad at each destination. These proto-Calvinists don’t know the name of their beliefs yet. But they will. When it’s glacialized and they feel their worlds compress their necks.

I side with Voltaire—who craved the prelapsarian like the rest of us. The Candide of all our lives makes us suctioned and nomadic and thin, but he, like me, realized God’s too good for ordinated deaths.

III.

My panties cascade down my thinning, bony waist—I am winter, and they fall like leaves down my limbs. The bite rim lining the inside of my cheeks steepens—I am an earthquake, and my quivering teeth are tectonic plates, erecting mountains of evidence of angst. My throat spasms when I force confessions and defenses down—I am an obstructed volcano, charring myself from the inside out. My period is black and has crawled out of my body for almost three whole weeks now—I am acid rain, and as much as my intentions may be right, I only release disgusting irritants.

. . .

When my professor asks me “Where was God in the Holocaust?,” all I can think about is how I look like a child in a concentration camp right now. And I haven’t even had nearly all that pain.

And then pragmatists resurrect as skeletons to stare me down with bone-cold eyes, clink their teeth to say post-tragedy Horatio was a handsome stoic—dying is the only certainty, and thus the only practicality.

And I do not mean to kill myself, but I fear that on the inside, I am dying again. 

IV.
But God, in a black robe for our lapsarian funerals, with red eyes from bawling, glowing with the fiercest heartbreak, appears to amalgamate with our midnights.

But God, hovering over our blackest, sludgy waters, is susurrating “Let there be light.”