I read Mark Twain's The War Prayer last semester. If you haven't seen it, I'd highly recommend giving it a look. After reading Twain I began to think, long and hard, about war and prayer, about the role professional religious persons occupy and what responsibility comes with that role in times of social/political crisis. Taking inspiration from Twain, I vowed to write my own short story or poem entitled "The War Prayer" back then. What's interesting, four months later, is that the poem below didn't arise out of my desparation around Iraq which i thought it would, but my feelings of helplessness as I watch my drug-addicted friends go further and further into their own emotional comas. Ultimately I think Iraq continues because someone somewhere needs a nation full of smoked-out 20 somethings to be so wrapped up in getting their next sack, hit, or fix that they don't care about their own government killing families in a land far far away. Maybe i'm just too judgmental and I need to "live and let live," let my hippie friends smoke their weed in peace--that's what people tell me all the time. But I tell you what: if one of my friends saw me put a gun to my head when i was in a foul mood, I hope they would--out of love, not self-righteousness--tell me to put it down because foul moods are temporary. So here's my War Prayer, a cry to/for God, a cry to/for my people--one in the Other and the other in the One.
War Prayer
by Ejoye
it's the slow suicide,
the mental fog, enabling a synthetic transcendence
that's really just reality avoidance,
the 'here somehow but not really,'
the 'i'm gone somehow but not really,'
...the 'really?' question next morning over breakfast.
it's the loss of consciousness, conscience-clarification,
the subtle disappearance of conscious contact that makes conscience and
clarification possible.
the 'i'll put that on hold for a few weeks' when shit gets fucked up
but the 'shit is fucked up' reality that disavows you of putting it on hold.
the 'no i'm okay' excuse in the face of your mess
with your mess being compounded by you thinking you're okay.
but they are all worse than me, so it's okay--okay?
it's the lie
that has me spinning here, wanting to slap you awake,
wanting to hug you back to life,
wanting to strangle the social systems that make your lie seem so true
wanting to band-aid all the bleeding wounds
that hurt so bad you fail to notice
it's even a lie anymore.
you read headlines and get pissed
about the bodies using violence
and the violence using bodies
and so you enter into some illusion
about your body not doing violence that way
or violence not doing you that way,
but it's all the same.
sleeping or dying or denying
it's all the same. the war is the War is the war is the War.
the violence begins
with you undoing yourself: your observations, your relationships,
your talents, your body. the slow suicide is the prescription
you were sold at the pharmacy of fools.
the biggest lie they ever told is that we need it.
the greatest sin of our lives: we labeled them "physician" and believed it.
i wanted to get mad about those guys taking out liquor store owners
and beating them to a pulp. "genocide in our communities they said."
i thought, demand necessitates supply; why kill the middle man?
why not take out the infrastructure
that's causing men to suck bottles like drug-addicted prostitutes suck dick?
...you know the things that cause people to give up
so that getting high
or getting drunk
is the only thing they have to look forward to at the end of the day
...infrastructure like health care and education and povery,
the things politicians seem to understand
and never change.
but this morning, after listening to one more friend talk about the trap,
the deadening, destructive, devilish demand
seeking refuge in someone
who feels just a little too much,
who sees the patterns just a little too clear,
who hears the cries just a little too loud,
and wants to change the shit so bad, but can't,
who wants to change the shit so bad, but can't, so just takes
the lighter to the bowl and inhales toxins just to escape,
escape the very capacity (empathy) that promises freedom---
i too feel like killing something: pulling something out
and beating it over and over and over.
but what would I kill?
you? me?
my ability to feel so much rage and compassion at the same time?
isn't that what I want you to be able to do?
i feel like I want to kill, but what i really want is to hold,
to hold this ground,
to hold this troubled soul,
to hold the lack of pin-points and absolutes that all these
holy rollers and twelve steppers seem to stand on one minute
and get knocked down by the next.
i want the war to end.
the weapons of manufactured weariness,
blindly accepted prescriptions for oblivion,
useless patterns of supply and demand
set in motion by a rhetoric of 'freedom' ("free" markets, "free" spirits)
by people who must control and lie about it in order to live,
the weapons of easy answers and easy-way-outs,
the weapon of self-hatred,
the weapon of other-hatred--
i want them to be placed on the Eucharisitic table,
next to the bread and the wine,
on the day of God's great cease-fire.
because something in me knows,
no matter how much better it gets,
or how much you want to quit on any given day,
this whole cycle is bigger than you,
bigger than me,
and so the solution--whether it manifests in this one body
or the great cosmic stage--must be bigger too.
so hear me, dear God, this morning, through my poetry,
i'm praying to You.
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