If not your god, then one of my own,
made in the image of a shaven carcass,
thoroughly cleaned but somewhat incomplete,
open for entry for anything that is willing
to pierce & be preserve inside damaged blood.
The difference between the prayed for
& the preyed on is vantage point.
There is a pigeon, matted on a highway
as a lonely god of aviation, a tragic beast
when restricted to ground. On occasion, I carelessly
walk on the freshly dead, but it could be a blessing
to be ignorant of what lies beneath my feet:
a wounded wing, its dried blood on cement,
& then possibly a stretch of dirt engulfing a box
with a cross on it, a boy behind the face of the cross
& the planks, flooded by earth, within the wood,
thinking a god will meet him on the other side
of something that proceeds the moment of death
but it’s just me waiting, above the gelid body,
patient for the streetlight to tell me death
will not follow me where death mostly follows us
& instead, it is my father behind me, holding a drum
covered with the skin of a goat, stretched
to make the slanted noise of ghosts, something
that would say I am less a god
now that you’ve touched me.