The Church of Poetry

There is only one real God (and an infinite number of false ones...I myself have been guilty of idolatry towards many of them, usually the ones of long, soft limbs and sparkling laughs)...and poetry is nothing less, in its essence, than a revelation, a constant evolving liturgy in praise of both itself and the world around it. It is its own miracle.

Yes, Wallace Stevens was right, poets are the high priests of the invisible. But even the invisible of which we write is real. We reflect, refract and create, our lambent minds showing the world what is really there, if they have but the couer rage to reach out and embrace it. I never have loved without cause. The degree to which I was loved in return is a statement, not of my worthiness, but of the faith and vision of the one loving. All are worthy of love.

Like a priest earnestly sworn to celibacy, I am at times regretful of what I have left behind to step closer in to the center of the universe (read my old work "My Electric Lady") but cannot indulge the greatest cowardly whim, the lie that somehow it is not there, that God and truth and love are irrelevent.

I don't let others tell me what I know to be untrue and barter my allegience for my own gain. I have done this in the past, bowing before women in my past in expedience to their shallow affections. Not all women, not all men, love in a shallow form, where everyday requires new rituals, new sacrifices of love to be new proofs of our hearts.

Maybe I shall start my own church, the church of the poets. King David was a poet. "The Song of Solomon", one of the books of the Holy Bible, is a long-form erotic poetry dialogue. Much of what is right and true and necessary is in the form of poetry...even politics has its rule that one campaigns in poetry and governs in prose. Perhaps we need to govern in poetry, as well.

Like any religion, poetry can be used to foul ends, but it is a way to tap into our most earnest and worthy essences, to free us from pain and doubt and isolation, to bring us closer to the warmth of the center of the universe, to make us understand and experience love.

Perhaps it is time I did what I was supposed to be doing, all along.