Young Writers Society

So this is a slam I'm working on for my Creative Writing class final (but not really slam cause I don't have the voice really for it) BUT I thought I'd include a recording of it anyway. My laptop is kind of falling to pieces because I abuse so you can hear my fan kick in a couple of times. Sorry.

https://soundcloud.com/coral4444/empty-house-men-like-candles

1
I went to a church and told a priest I’d been looking for you, God.
I asked him what that meant. He said he didn’t know, but that
you are here, inside me, put his finger over my heart
and said, “You just don’t know its shape.” But God,
I have looked again and again for you, and I am
nothing but empty for the asking.

People keep talking to me about you, god, faces
turned up like suns, eyes wide,
hands spread like the wings of carrier birds,
all bearing the same message:
god is a basket of fruit. God is a perfectly made bed.
God is a cup of coffee in the morning when nothing else will do thet trick.

But God — you are a forge to me. You are the iron
hitting the iron, the fire, and the soot-handed man
who only makes weapons.
I was not made to hold weapons, god.
I do not know what to do with what you’ve given me.

Some days I want to live in your little birds’ words.
I wander over and they kiss my hands clean of your absence;
I open up my ear canals until they are wide as bowls and try to let a river
of godliness through my head, thinking maybe I can find you
somewhere in the pause of their speeches, that if they pray
over me enough times, I will be able to pray back.

My hands are clean, but they are not healed.
They refuse to be pages of a book. They will not pray.


2
I am not holy.
My body is a delicate piece of architecture and most mornings
I find myself more of a blueprint than a building;

I asked you for a little bit of warmth and instead
you left me to the wind as if each gust
might scrape away another layer of skin, but god,
there is nothing inside me resembling you;

I am only neurons firing, the bellows of breath a body
falling into disrepair from the very moment it is built.
How will I find you when I am ash, and gone?

3
I opened a cavity in my chest for you. I carved a house made of wood.
There are books for reading inside of me, god, but
I am finding that your love is not spelled with the same language mine is
and am growing afraid that you will finally perch yourself in my chest
only to find I am too delicate to bear your weight, that you will sink
down my belly like a stone —

that you will look at this body, read what’s written
on its walls, and find it too foreign to call your own.


4
I am waning, god.
I’ve unhinged my jaw, tried to swallow
all the light you’ve given me, but it
will not fit in my mouth.

5
I went to the church again today, and watched the roses
climb down its walls. The doors opened
like two big hands saying, “Amen,”
and the priest sat in his pew, like a candle in a drawer.
He prayed and prayed, burnt so bright with it
that he dripped wax onto the floor. Mountains of it lay there,
dried from days past. He’d carved text into it with his fingernails,
whirls of holy words that I could not quite make out.
I told him I’d been looking at my heart.
I told him I’d traced each crack, splinter,
and tunnel of blood, and could not find you.
He took me to the garden at the back of the church.
Rows of plants stood like disciples.
He said, “God is here; he is the breath between us,
the movement of the branches of the trees,
the name of the hour. He is the sound
and the cold and the sun.”

I walked through the garden for a long time.
I touched the leaves of plants like they were my brothers and
looked up at the sun until I couldn’t any longer.
I found a stray seed on the ground,
put it to my mouth like sacrament
and it burnt me as I swallowed it.

I am waiting for it to grow, God.
I am waiting for your garden to bloom inside of me, but the seed
is burning through my stomach and
each day, I find you are falling from my fingertips,
slow and heavy as ash.