Divinity Divided

A directory for those who get lost frequently.

i. Heaven is a cave.
Rock-ribbed, tooth-jagged. A wound that forgives itself and asks not how it came to be.
It's a place you have to crawl through.
Prayers collect in cobwebs and tangles, piousness pools and stagnates in shallow lakes, angels are made of insect-longing and phreatic desire.
Here, God is a Paleothyris, an anapsid. Temples closed, teeth sharp.

ii. Heaven is for Cavemen and no one else.
There is fire that does not burn the hand and fruit that will not blacken and rob the gums.
Saber-toothed angles paint the shadows, awaiting their slaughter, devoted to nothing but the very thought of hunger, of needs to be filled.
Here, God is a dog that domesticates itself.
His is the fur that never knots itself into disobedience.
His are the jaws that never close around soft, importunate throats.

iii. God does not know you.
You will not know Heaven.

iv. All of God's children died eons ago.
They died hunched over, spines not yet evolved to un-bow their heads.
That's why you have to get on your knees to pray;
You have to try and trick him into recognizing you, fool him into listening.
Heaven is a place you have to crawl to.
A reproachful wound, perpetually scabbed over in defiance to blame.

v. In God's absence, nature raised you.
Set you upright. Shoulders back, eyes forward, a predatory fraud of rapacious appetites.
Brother to no man, the self-proclaimed son of God: Creation was a birthright.
You made language, carved up the world and gave the pieces new names and virtues.
Meaning and intention; subject, predicate, verb.

An ill-defined landscape is useless, is inexcusable. 

A man with empty hands is indefensible.

Therefore, you invented weaponry and the rational to use them.
Here, God was pretext, a contrivance turned platitude.
God was a bullet held tight between the teeth, a dare, come and f*****g take it from me.

vi. A gun can turn a man into a God.
If you aim it right, make the right demands, you can get just about anything from anyone.
Aim high enough, you can make any man crawl.

vii. Back in the golden age of humanity, when man first became an adversary to himself,
If you wanted someone dead you had to get dirty.
You had to take apart creation with your bare hands, feel his warm flesh against your own,
Feel his pulse like your own. Terrified and dancing.
You had to get his desperate, pleading blood on you. Let it stain you.
The inconsequential separation of your flesh, the horrified gasp of your breathes intertwined.
If you want a man dead you have to look him in the eye, see yourself look back.
God is a knife tucked between the ribs, is the bile-slick regret wormed deep in the belly. God is a thing that wounds.
Heaven is the will to forget mortality, the heartbroken plea for distinction between faulty instincts and inherent evil.

viii. God hunts through an open wound, a field of marigold-angels and thistle-rot prayer piled at his feet. 

In his weathered hands, a rifle. In his cavernous soul, an edict wreathed in lead. 

Is there anything more holy than judgement at a distance?
Anything so graceful as damnation on demand?
It's love at ten paces. It's how you make good on your word.
It's God coming to take the bullet back, to beat the obstinance out of your bitter, unrelenting jaw.
Here, God is a starving promise of dissection, of disarticulation into trophy and meal.

Heaven is a funeral parlor. Heaven is the cotton in the mounted head of the deer made philosopher -

The one who wonders deeply about the meaning of hunger and the need for wolves.

Who wonders about the source of wounds and how to forgive them.

ix. After the body collapses,
After the stab has subsided and the bullet has carved its exit through you;
Once fatigue has eaten away at the foundations and the cave can no longer support itself,
All you can do is lay down and succumb to nature.
But God is the rabid, frenetic ache in your chest that demands survival.
While the world may lease the blood from your veins,
May chase you out and christen you inconsequential, render you meaningless and frail;
You cannot rest so long as it lives.

So long  as there is a thing to call God, you cannot stop to dress the wound.

Raise yourself up slowly, on hands and knees, and remember that:

x. Heaven is a place you crawl through.