Litany

Dear prophet,

You say understanding of the scriptures is the only doorway to the being that watches over us from the sky, but when I read it, I see where it says clearly, he created man in his own image and likeness.

Is it my unworthiness of the curse man that makes you tell me to flip pages before I can feel the one who crafted me into broken shards of jagged glass?

The divine lives in the dust.

The sky shouldn't ask the grass for its credentials before it rains.

Dear prophet,

If I were to write a letter with series of questions growing in this desert

Like why must this already broken body have to carry the weight of sins of a man who never carried him to this river of life, already parched and flowing thin.

Why I was shackled with dominion over the birds of the sky and the fishes of the sea, when those same free birds I envy and floating fishes I wish to be.

If I am wrong to choose an earthly significance over a posthumous consolation for this life’s ordeal

Would you mail it to this unquestionable one you claim sent thee?

Dearest prophet,

Flesh and blood and sweat and tears we both share in common.

But tell me truly, I implore—how can assumptions you were indoctrinated into be offered here as undiluted truth for me to drink?

Is it not too early to grow drunk on unfamiliar certainties

when the mundanity of life already quenches our thirst?

Or is it only from the bridges we cross in reasoning

that our discrepancies arise?