Saturday, April 26, 2014

Your Small Religion

You are forbidden from using the word "love"
to describe how you feel about me.

Because, in that moment,
I don't think you realized what it was you were rejecting,
You with the impoverished soul,
Who see the children
and gay people paid to serve them
as an abstraction, a two-dimensional talking point
that you can dispose of and hide away,
like props in your war game,
forgot that

It was me you were rejecting. 

I'm the human casualty on the other side of your culture war. 

Is the impact of it all more real to you when
you see me on the other side?

Or will you dismiss my feelings as an over-reaction
and grating sentimentality
for caring that people like my friends
-people like me-
aren't marginalized?

If caring about people
you refuse to care for
makes me too delicate
too hurt
too tragic
too pathetic
too liberal
too heretical
too much
for the religion you serve
to listen-
not for a conversion or to score points or to please God, but
because I'm human and it's right and proper to listen-
then your religion is too infinitesimal
to spark life into the vast, raw,
gaping, bleeding,
cracking, hoping,
breathing, pulsating,
thriving, dying
human condition.

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