I wish I believed.
I know the songs
the ones that sound
so so wrong
when I sing them.
How great thou love lifted
me in the garden by
and by. Drinking
another cup of coffee
staring into the blackness –
communion with a bean –
which is as close to god
as I feel most days,
not being a farmer
or a builder of mighty things
The book it says
Jesus was a carpenter
and Peter was a fisherman,
and I find myself wondering
whether the apostles drank
import or domestic beer
while they threw out their nets
the way I did
when I first believed.
I wish the stories spoke
the same way silence does
first thing in the morning
or late into the night
when insomnia or bad dreams
strike. God, I suppose, exists
between the tick tocks
of a grandfather clock.
The ghost of the old man
who shuffles on the porch
smoking his restless pipe
knows this and together
we commune between
the sweeping of the second hand
pacing the same creaky floorboards
and scratching pen to paper
lines and endless groans
and poems no one will hear
and no one will read.