Paradoxically Praying For Reason

Praying to be able to use Your gift of reason to evade the faiths we invented, now used to control us

Trusting in god to permit us to co-exist with all the false-god tricked infidels filling his world

Beseeching him to allow us to stumble upon our own good solutions at our own slow pace

Hoping ‘He’ need not bother to take the time to watch over us at every single moment, 24x7x365

Asking for the blessing of logic to fight off the polished spin of smarmy religious propagandists

Reveling in the wonders, but not mindlessly labeling random tragedies as his unfathomable will

Casting off the myth of some mysterious plan which we must accept, but cannot ever understand

Seeking freedom from mind-numbing, rote-memory fundamentalist literalism, of any stripe

Paradoxically praying that the siege of science by dogmatic religions will somehow be lifted

Asking him to permit us to recreate the worn out legends we have so warped and attributed to him

Pleading to be freed from the psychic bondage they control us with, in his fictional name

Working towards salvation from abusive dogma via reproducible and peer-reviewed results

Casting a blind eye on religious monuments while looking closely within at our empty mystery

Rejecting their narrow and self-centered myth of eternal souls, granted only to we humans

Praying their religious franchises go bankrupt but their churches at last be put to some good use

Calling out the power-hungry who would use our simple need to faith to their own greedy ends

Searching for strength to cast off their easy answers and face the existential questions we fear most

Praying for a faith that does not seek to control us thru ignorance, fear and superstition

Seeking great human wisdom, but not revealed truth in that good literature of scripture

Begging these gods we call love not to order that we smite one another once again, in their names

Asking him to halt the lame demand, mouthed in every political speech that he bless this country

Needing his wisdom to stop righteously killing one another over fictional religions we alone invented

Looking for true inspiration while rejecting wornout fairytales and sighing over children’s prayers

Replacing comic certitude with lonely wailing, shoulder to shoulder, like wolves under cold stars

Praying for reason that we shall not be tricked into misplacing our precious faith once again

Probing for answers without any guidance from an infallible pope’s pompous pronouncements

Placing our belief in mysteries we lack the tools to study or the wisdom to understand

Throwing off their twisted dictums arising from frightened foolishness beaten into revered tradition

Mocking their pomp and pretense while unmasking their empty threats of silly perdition

Combing their worn-out, corny fatwas and ridiculous encyclicals for new comedy sketches

Choosing rationalism over scripture despite the dubious loss of their gilded, antique heavens

Respecting their ancient wisdom but rejecting those who use it now merely as a means to power

Condemning them to publicly self-critique their horrid jihads and crusades as they serve the poor

Chanting mindless rosary mantras to free our minds from the stale doctrines to which they bound us

Praying for reason to cast off their self-granted holy rationalization of ongoing immoral acts

Discovering that a religion must be discarded just like any no longer credible scientific theory

We’ll Never Quite Reach Nothing

Human influence asymptotically approaches nothing as time approaches infinity

Even the effects of our own tiniest efforts cannot ever shrink to absolutely nothing

They can’t ever become smaller than say, the background radiation from the Big Bang

Their gracefully infinite approach to nothing is an enduring tribute to our wanton fervor

Still, even our greatest fall as far, and just as quickly, as those we deem to be the least among us

For, after all, there’s always another half the distance towards emptiness to which to decay

It doesn’t matter if the remainder is but infinitesimally larger than nothing

The ripples of our actions can be divided forever and still retain all their information

Concurrently, the amplitude of their influence infinitely approaches an unreachable zero

But the dilution of our acts is further complicated by their mixing with those of all others

For though they still exist independently, like choppy waves, they can never be separated

So well are they homogenized that they could not be re-distilled

So thoroughly are they mixed that they are effectively perfectly encrypted

Still, the reaction of our great deeds and shameful acts cannot ever amount to nothing

The time frame or the distance that they might have traveled quit simply makes no difference

Even the ever-decreasing density of expanding space cannot quite erase us totally

Verily, none of us can ever be reduced to nothing in the lifetime of this one universe

Our venal gossip passes unchanged through the eons and is still different to each listener

Drunken shouts will echo hoarsely thru time, each retaining every slurred and cursing syllable

Catchy advert jingles tinkle merrily on, unheard and unheeded across the march of time

The empty promises of our leaders cannot totally dissipate despite their utter lack of substance

The far-reaching after-effects of our numbing sports extravaganzas will carry on forever

The wondrous results of our faith-based initiatives will withstand the test of all time

The benefits of our wars of liberation will live on long after these noble efforts are completed

Just so, the marvelous dragon flies crushed flat on you car cannot ever really fully disappear

Even our everlasting beauty and truth persists despite infinite attenuation

Our context-free morals defy the test of time, simply awaiting their own re-discovery

The beliefs we held in some eternal heaven shall carry on, even though they are simply fairytales

And so we see, it’s really not for a cosmic nothing that we eat, sleep, shit, fight, shout and fuck

You’ll Become Nothing In The Void

An insecurity-inflamed petty ego drove you like some vile moth toward the hot media lights

You will get to enjoy an eternal, unconscious respite in utter darkness, near absolute zero

The greed that drives you to such heights during your short, selfish life will abruptly end

Afterwards others will briefly find new baubles to live for, but you won’t be aware of them

The effect of the big lies you spread will quickly recede to the cosmic background level

You will feel nothing of that and neither will you ever be conscious of anything at all again

The  power you wield now shall be taken from you, at the very latest, just at your passing

Not to worry, that nagging need shall disappear, along with all the rest of your venal thoughts

You wont be punished for scamming them with bogus heavenly insurance for their fictional souls

For neither you nor your foolish flock shall dwell anywhere, any longer, for any time at all

Now, your too-clever loopholeing earns you a fortune and the respect of your one-track peers

But, there’ll never be any more over-complicating obfuscation down in the fine print for you

You avoided any contemplation of the infinite for your entire superficial, yet hollow life

You will have no need of thought and no mechanism for thinking, and you will not know

So you died with the most stupid toys and, yes, you actually did win this lame rigged game

But there’ll be no smirking HappilyEverAfter as your lifeless dust dilutes in outer space

You fulfilled that most sacred and holy of trysts and brought forth the next generation

Yet, none will perceive the eternity after all life on earth ends forever along with our sun

You proved war was inevitable and wasted absurd unquestioned sums providing evidence

You won’t even see you have no real weapons, no enemies to demonize and nothing to protect

You called yourselves Masters of the Universe and knew you were the Best and Brightest

That vain perspective will silently implode as you spiral into the abyss of Ultimate Equality

You made bribed deals, exaggerated claims, omitted details and hid in locked compounds

The suffering of your long disease was but a prelude to your infinite sentence to nothing

You mindlessly wasted, destroyed, polluted and consumed as much and just as fast as you could

Now, be spread randomly for unimaginable eons by the cosmic systems you so carefully ignored

You stood under lights delivering their script, usually believing the nonsense that you read

Darkness shall bind you, silence will fill you, and emptiness shall be your eternal state

You trumpeted Traditional Family Values, preaching that regulation would cost them jobs and money

You will not be greedy, you will not be scheming, you will, like me, simply not be, at all

Your schedule will still contain important items you just had to do, but whose time never came

Soon there will be no pressuring deadlines or over-commitments, yet certainly never any boredom

You stepped on them and kicked them down, backbiting and ass-kissing to that corporate apex

But the incessant greed-blinded insecurity driving you will be lost in infinite dreamless sleep

Surely the simple faith of your lifelong poverty will at last receive its just and everlasting reward

Yea, for certain, ye must never again endure suffering, grief, tears, pain, hunger or anything at all

Gone Off in Empty Silence With So Much Unsaid

You had always lived like the time to sagely compose your real message was still to come

But actually you’ve gone off quite silently now, and it seems likely, into eternal emptiness

You felt you waited patiently, still ready to make your statement or to take some real action

Now, it’s hard for others to really know if you were the silent type, or just another empty shell

Gone off in silence but not without leaving a wide trail of random noise and messy litter

As far as we can tell, the space you leave behind still unsullied by any conscious reflection

Your blurry recollections, sloppily stored, simply evaporate, unsorted and un-distilled

That is, finished but not summarized, finalized but not completed, gone but not packed up

Went away unprepared, unwilling and unable to form even a short and sensible goodbye

Borne off, you thought, before your time, with yet so much you had never even started

Carried off of the couch to the hospital, then to the cemetery without even a decent interval

You raised your hand far too late, buried without even having thought out a real question

Gone beyond our limited communications even should you find your true voice at last

We will label it a so-called mute testimony and say it was really all you planned on leaving

Caught off-guard and carried away in silence, or did you actually have nothing at all to say?

Hey! Nobody could ever read the beautiful thoughts that may have existed, but only in your head

You have departed, having tacitly accepted things as they were going, and are going further still

Now you have left it to us impute your beliefs merely from your mundane habits

We can’t know your brilliance and grand emotions from your so very ordinary life

Though your soul may have been filled to bursting, it has all evaporated, without any residue

Your wondrous family surrounds you now, but you call each one by a different name

With the drugs, you cannot realize that they know you’ve already gone off in silence

The past is closing in around you because you can no longer process the present

Though your greatest works still await you, there is only a future that you will not experience

Yet, there still are those many things you would have, could have, and, likely, should have done

In your mind, you kept reserved the future for those special tasks that you were born to do

But the short time you paused was confused by a drugged pain, in impersonal surroundings

The last thing you read was another bill and the last thing you wrote was a check

You did not plan on your self-numbing repetitions halting without some decent interlude

There was only time to cap off your life with a short period of deliriously painful suffering

Torn away so quickly and completely with barely time for the briefest of regrets

Gone off in a silence that we can only try to differentiate from a simple & mindless emptiness