I’ve Got God Watching Under Me

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.