Join the Neopoet online poetry workshop and community to improve as a writer, meet fellow poets, and showcase your work. Sign up, submit your poetry, and get started.

I Won't Find the Real God in This Place

I won't find the real God in this place
with woodcuts and paintings,
and crumbling marble.
I won't find Him
in the Egyptian, nor Greek galleries either.

And this should come
as no surprise,
since I never found Him
in a church or temple, for that matter.

I don't know
if that is what
makes the depression drip so thickly from me.

A long time ago
I had a pain in my heart
that was so very acute.
Now, the dulling of that pain,
that is, the slow ache it was replaced by
seemed to me to be an improvement.
My new therapist says otherwise.

In looking for God
here, there, and around again
it occurs to me I'm also looking for myself,
separately.
Why the fuck are we both so damn elusive?

Instead of finding answers,
I'm left admiring dead men's trash,
along with the occasional monstrance
containing an old saint's bone.

Tomorrow, maybe I'll take on the Jazz Age,
but for now I'll just wander the Circle,
and continue to delude myself.

Maybe for once,
I will find the Angel of Death around the corner.
And maybe he will be kind to me,
and finally say his peace,
alone,
on this inner city street.

Review Request (Intensity): 
I want the raw truth, feel free to knock me on my back
Review Request (Direction): 
What did you think of my title?
How was my language use?
What did you think of the rhythm or pattern or pacing?
How does this theme appeal to you?
How was the beginning/ending of the poem?
Is the internal logic consistent?
Editing stage: 

Comments

Can't think why you don't just get on with the things you have and be a damn good person then I expect you will feel a God touching your ways, but where is this God.
Maybe look inside and make that part more Godlike.
Good write though,
Take care out there you never know who is watching.
Yours Ian..

.
Give critique to help keep Neopoet great.
Unconditional love to you all.
"Learn to love yourself first"
Yours as always, Ian.T, Sparrow, and Yenti

.

I use the the great depth of honesty from Krishnamurti in On God. If we examine our thoughts, really consider what we are thinking, we will quickly understand the absurdity of the whole affair. As if god was a real consciousness in personification , with a beard perhaps, quite demanding and insecure, as per the first commandment. What is this search for god? expect to find "him" hiding under the bed?
But that's besides the point..which is your poem.
I do like some of the images. the idea of taking on the Jazz age. You drew me into the poem very well, the first stanza does its job. But as nobody has ever "found god" , at least those living in our dimension, or is likely to, I was not as engaged as I would like to have been in the poem. It became for me a journal entry, a monologue, looking for yourself and god, and resigned to depend on the compassion of death to fill in the secrets in a philosophic dialogue,
Consider as Blake that god is the imagination. Then you are free to invent god, however you want.
The imagination must dig deep into this very complex "faith" which drives men to "seek god", and come out with a poetry- like Beckett's Waiting for Godot.

Eumolpus
I'd rather learn from one bird how to sing
than teach ten thousand stars how not to dance
ee cummings

These folks don't know you, and who does
really, but I am aware of how important this
crisis of faith is to you, but it seems more than
that now ... more than not preaching to your
congregation, almost an accepted non-belief.

I am hoping the best for you and yours sir and
that you will get through this time as all others,
with two feet on the ground.

I really liked your poem, perhaps if there was
someway to include some of yourself to your
audience, like in the title (Ex Preacher's Trials) or
something much better than that.

but I find him everywhere. In the dawning of the day, in a leasurely stroll through the hills, wherever people meet and bleat and in silent contemplation. I am not surprised that he can't be found in these contrived places, he is too great to be so hemmed in.

Keith Logan
the happy chappy
https://www.neopoet.com/community-guidelines

(c) Neopoet.com. No copyright is claimed by Neopoet to original member content.