I thought: there is no time to write this down. There are things to do. But it is just turning two in the morning and this busyness has cost me my joy and my sanity for the last few days. It seems the busier I get, the less time I make the less time I have. And then, maybe we can actually MAKE time. For it seems when I stop a while, to acknowledge the world, there is always time and peace enough to get done that which needs to be done.

So here I am at one of my favorites times. Early, early in the morning. A steady rain shot with pan flashes of lightning is breaking the unwelcome weather. I am still coughing from a bit of lemon cake that went down a half hour ago, and in her sad voice Patty Griffin is singing from the CD player

Isn't it hard sometimes?
isn't it lonely?
how i still hang around here
and there's nothing to hold me...

THE NICENE CREED

I don’t really like saying it, and usually when the time to recite it comes, I’m not inside of the church, I’m in the vestibule writing in my journal. Today I was in a pew, with several other people. I chose not to say it. I don’t care for the Nicene Creed. I’ve never felt right about a whole house full of people muttering a pat statement of things they believe in—amazing, incredulous things—as if this matters.

Around the fourth century, which is to say when Christianity had bee around for a good three hundred years—several things. It became first acceptable, then fashionable, then crucial (if you wanted to escape death) to become a Christian. Every bishop and every church began fighting—in a most un-Christian manner—about whose Jesus was the right one, those who lost were killed or denounced, the scrolls and holy books powerful people didn’t like were banned, the ones that were liked became the Bible and any jackass could be a Christian.
And now any jackass is.
And after that , to make it nice and simple, so that no one could disagree, a bunch of disagreeable bishops got together and drew up the Nicene Creed. If everyone could agree to this, everyone would be a Christian. Simple as that.
And yet, for three hundred years before this, Christians raised the dead, worked miracles, witnessed the power of God and were held in awe (often mixed with fear and repugnance) by the people around them. For three hundred years before anyone mouthed the words “I believe” or had a definite doctrine or dogma there was something that definitely held Christians doggedly together. They gave their lives for something. They loved something more than the world, and it is not contained in the cold lines of the creed recited every Sunday. Belief is not enough.
And over fifteen hundred years later we have Catholics, Anglicans, Presbyterians, Pentecostals, just to name a few, who all agree to this Creed and yet don’t seem to agree with each other (let alone love each other) at all. The Catholics split from the Orthodox over a single word in it, but the Orthodox have this creed too.
As we progress into the twenty-first century anyone who ever thought Jesus meant anything to them might want to concentrate less on “I believe, I believe” and more on, “I love, I love, I dedicate, I am dedicated. I know. I know.”

Oh, you old drunk motherfucker, fat and sightless in all of your ways,
groping like a worm through the shit you made, jealous and malicious over the shit you are, the
shit you were, the shit you ever shall be
world without end
Amen
why is it a crime to wrench a man’s throat open
and wouldn’t the police understand if I dipped you in lye
if i ripped out your eyes
slowly
you bastard
shut the fuck up
i’m talking now
and how would you like it if i carried out my dreams
ripped you into seams
i suppose you thought i’d sit silently
silently, for one year and one half i listented to motherfuckers
was fucked over by motherfuckers
sons and daughter motherfuckers
little baby motherfuckers
fuck that shit
next time you’ll get lit
i would like to ram a car through every asshole near and far
i would like to make you pay
for all the bullshit you’d like to say
if would take forcep and prong
just to rip out your fucking tongue
and i would laugh you all the way
to the hospital that way
the Morrigan is high tonight
don’t piss me off
get out my sight.

Good night.

This was the love we shared
Tenderly like being ripped open
I pretended that you never cared
And you could not seem to leave me alone
I set you all on fire
You walked the wire
You spoke on pulpits to testify to me
And my
Love was rat poison
It made you curl up
And it made you scream
And you
You were unable to
Make me come
To make me cream

This was the love the that we had
You would slap me
And I’d make you mad
You’d throw a table
And I’d make a scene
I’d get the blow torch and you’d start to lean
Into the fire
Into the fire
And I
Was like your whiskey
And were like the drunk
And I was the Jim Beam bottle
You threw to the floor with a thunk

This was our love
Soft,
Like back seat fucking
This was the passion you burned for
Like the bishop for an altar boy
You thought I’d alter you
You thought there’s something in me
That was something like you
You spoke about all these deeds
You were never up to my speed
You never met my needs
By I thought I had to meet yours

And I
Was your confession
You whispered me into your rosary
And I was your emission
When you dreamed I caught your wasted seed
And this love
Was so nasty
It tore you up and split your shit in two
And now
Whenever you see me
Your face is red because the time that I fucked you

TENDERLY… LIKE BEING RIPPED OPEN

I finally faced my fears, or began facing them, and opened up the first of the two volumes I have of William Blake. I didn’t make it past his engravings. I was sucked in by them without getting to the poetry. It’s popular for teenagers to read “Tyger Tyger” and say how much they love Blake, but that’s just the tip of his work. Blake, like Yeats and Milton, was an epic poet, and like Yeats and other British authors of the last two centuries, his poetry embodied a complex mixture of philosophy and spirituality that evolved from a mixture of Christianity, British mythology, Greek though, and Judaism.
Like the Jewish Kabbalah, Blake’s work, and Yeats’s comes out of a dream. It is told with eyes half closed and heard in a half waking state. Blake’s illustations and poems are visceral, sometimes frightening. When he creates from what he has read in the Bible, he does it like a Kabbalist. Scripture is an untold treasure house of poems and myths, lust dreams and nightmares. What he produces is neither didactic nor comforting. There is no propaganda. To him the Bible was not handbook, but soulbook, and what he had heard and read from it is etched on his soul. So the art he produces is real.
There is a lesson here—all about the bringing forth of story. My worst work is “TV show work” reading a myth or an article, hearing someone tell me something, and knocking it off, doctoring it up and pasting it together to manufacture a cheap story. But real story, and it’s inherent visions, heavens and nightmares “come up” they come forth like Lazarus from the grave or oil up out of the earth. They come up from the insides after you have consented to let yourself be opened.