blink my eyes and look around

today, again, i feel like praying.

i feel it in my feet that want to run from this place, and in my hands that freeze together pointed like a cathedral. i feel it in my head the most, my frontal lobe beating hard with impulse: get out of here while you still can. go, run, make tracks.

today my body wants to pray even if my mind says no and my lips are formless.

embarrassingly, i wish for comfort, to stave off the prayer: a cheap chocolate brownie at the coffeehouse down the street that pulses terrible techno, even at 8, 9, 10, 11 in the morning. all day it's a disco.

i rush for the cheap brownie and eat it in big bites even though my friend sent me a vegan white chocolate bar that rides in my shoulder bag, the color of angel wings. i have it with me, but it seems too good somehow for how bad i feel. i need something as shitty as i feel inside. the brownie fills the void, but it makes me ill.

today i want to pray because my job is hard.

it goes through these phases of being too hard for a living breathing person to stand, and then of being just so wondrous that i catch my breath and thank whatever gods exist that i get to do it at all. and then there are a few days that are just days. they go by. i live. that's it.

today i am trying my hardest to be a machine. to type, to read, to turn the page. to type, to read, to turn the page, to close. to dial, to call, to state my purpose. to know my purpose. whatever that might be. but today my job makes me run from my office and devour cheap chocolate against my better judgement, after eating a completely vegan lunch.

and now i want to pray. it's sunny out finally, for an hour, and the sun shines on everything, on the kids somewhere that i fear i can't do anything for, can't save, on the trapped cows that make the milk for this awful chocolate, on the church steeples of my childhood stinging the sky like dying honeybees.

we give of ourselves, the churches say, you can too.
i give of myself, here, i say.

i pray, right here in the coffeehouse-disco.

let my ears be enough today
let my voice be enough today
let my feet know where to take us all

i hope that the slight ripping i feel is awakening and not fear.
i hope that somewhere a cow is lazing underneath this late fall sunlight, free and easy.
i hope all those kids for the moment are safe.
and i say amen.