Three poems on unbelief

by Paul Chuks

Dmytro Vynohradov

Heathenism

I enjoy pretending, Like when I’m at the job and My boss bands with me for A hug. I smile emphasizing I like my pay. That way, lord, I want to pretend You exist. In church, I slur my voice to make the angels dance as a bribe for my prayer requests I shut my eyes and scream to the heavens as the preacher says, I sink at the mention of Your name. I want to tell You about the flowers dying at the orchard, but there are children rotting from cancer and becoming dillies from war. I envy those who call and you answer. Me? heathens can’t see from unbelief. The prayers are beautiful, the songs too. I remember my father and say a prayer He likes the Psalms. I like the proverbs But I wish my mother will stop wishing me Happy Sunday. I know I am heathen because when i step in a church, apostasy becomes Contagious. Faith is for those who think God can’t be made flesh. When I die, I pledge To become a God and answer all our prayers.

Different Gods, One Jonah To be honest, I despise faith. the concept of hoping for things not seen, I run from it. I exist as an argument between two Gods —  the first colonized my fathers, the other, he bent his knees for. one gave us faith at the cost of our blood, the other does not do well with such bad ideas.

The world is much kinder to the colonizer. In the logic of holiness, the straight tree gets cut before the crooked one. Nobody knows why. One of the tropes of living, is the speed of dying, hence dying is an act of holiness.

If the colonizer kills me, i will happily die by this poem & grow into a straight tree. I will become like my fore-father’s God who only needs your wine in exchange for salvation. I will remove Jonah from the mouth of the whale & send him home with fish for dinner. See? that’s what holiness looks like between God & man

But you will understand this as blasphemy. blasphemy the tongue’s oldest intifada —  the Freudian slip of the gods, through man excuse my Tupac but who am i not to engage?

Unlatching

Like God in Exodus spoke to Moses I too, have longed for the voice of God to surge down the holes of my body bleeding of unanswered questions.

I’d come from church, my body stinking of faith. In the morning, I kowtow to pray, a wind unmakes my curtain and swallows my prayers. I walk out of my body, concluding it’s no longer virtuous to house a holy thing. + I can’t obey the gospel of waking up a sinner & dying a sinner. I wear a new body; faithless, anarchy. I say a word & an uprising begins. In church, my body —  now a little parcel of apostasy, watch people pray so hard I hear my abandoned prayers. On the last day, we’ll ask God what he did during Slavery, his answer would be a cold stare.