Joshua Keiter

And God grew quite nostalgic for the timeless formless time and form
he was while contemplating himself as pure being
before splitting himself into constituent parts
thereby entering the field of time and duality
and everything got kind of run amok
what with the existence of suffering along with joy
and it wasn’t very clear from what people were saying about him which he preferred
even though he’d like to agree with those who found him immanently in everything
the idea just kind of gave him the willies
so he went back to being the deist clockmaker god
a term which also confounded him because even if God needed to tell time
he wasn’t exactly the type who wears a watch
but that too grew tiresome because everything he created was so damn interesting
he couldn’t help poking his head around the corner here and there

And slowly God came to understand that being
a God of the gaps he was running out of things to be responsible for
as the advances of science and high fructose corn syrup
were putting him into tinier and tinier obsolescent corners
so to be frank he thumbed his way out of the backwaters
of an insignificant spiral arm of the Milky Way Galaxy
hitching a ride with a Higgs Boson particle
which would only further delay its discovery by a billion dollar donut in the ground
and he propelled himself out past the event horizon
bumping and grinding with some background radiation from the Big Bang
which increasingly he was finding himself of the opinion was a bad idea to begin with
and he exclaimed out loud not for the first time why didn’t I make the multiverse infinite in the first place
which of course only inadvertently started its own universe
with its own set of problems that God would soon have to concern himself with

And it came to pass that God grew tired and impatient
with all of the people who insisted on calling him names
including the ones who went by the names of Hitchens and Dawkins and Harris
whom God collectively referred to as Hitchawkis
because they sounded like a New Jersey suburb phrased that way
so God kept inventing more and more things that needed names
like tricycles and pomegranates and developing nations
but God couldn’t create a garage large enough to put everything in without throwing it away
so he hereby inscribed a moratorium on the naming of things
which if he’d thought of sooner would have saved a lot of kerfuffle between aardvarks and zebras
but that was all in the past anyway which God had forgotten about
seeing as how he was still contemplating himself in the eternal groves of memory
which God put together in a rush the other day leaving the house
when he suddenly realized he couldn’t remember how to misplace his keys

And on the hundredth day God rested said
screw you guys I’m going home
or its equivalent in Aramaic
a language God didn’t invent
but was merely an early proponent of
He left the wildlife to its own devices
floating backside up in a kiddie pool
with nothing for lunch but some morsels
mysteriously drifting on the top layer of the water
God said let it be fruit of the loom and multiply
and lo the essence passed through the bulging masses
so that all of God’s creation might eat
and slowly drift themselves to the surface
bloated and starving for his presence

Into the darkness
crawl tight space thru earth to walls
painted with no light

Hunter with bird mask
becomes animal shaman
opening the ground

Thru which things will spring
and return but for our sake
living by eating

Life feeds but on life
that begins what art there is
with masks and the flame

I’ve been following
the thread for so long that I
can’t recall the start

Beginnings account
for half of truth not only
they are unfinished

Finished and done with
the only words I cannot
find myself speaking

Already spoken
for once I’m untethered to
any translation

Mistaken belief
converted to possible
resembles onion

It’s occurred to me
that past is prologue only
to ideas of past

You can’t remember
the same situation twice
it gets more complex

In that it must deal
with continuing notions
of unmade present

A life kept on hold
is a moment that is not
strict movement forward

It has been days now
since the moon was visible
but Venus twinkles

Not quite like a star
because that song is over
we stopped singing it

You can tell silence
in the sound that surrounds it
and in nothing else

My past life seems to be the only thing
current in my life right now
a stationwagon packed to the roof
obstructing the rearview mirror
electrical sputtering at the end of the line
the banks of the river strewn with waste
I have boxes of videotapes
I would like to convert to another format
just to spend the hours as they were spent
when they were first recorded
mostly for the commercials I fast forwarded
when they were current
those thirty second chunks
extending to two minutes twice maybe five
the only way that life is spent
the only definition of now
is something already lapsed plus or minus
between two and five minutes from the current
so very many things to catch up on
if there is time to be had

The house
swayed.

This time tomorrow
I’ll be on a boat drifting
on the big ocean

Vacation I guess
though I’d rather be eating
tacos in Greenpoint

I need time with friends
‘til then I’ll be unemployed
dreaming of some cake

That’s right I said cake
the only thing that matters
is some cake with friends