Polyboxes Paradoxes
I faced alarming paradoxes
as I headed toward puberty.
First,
my King James Bible-belting parents,
extended family,
and all-hopelessly-WHITE farm community
taught me
God loves me
and all the children,
red and yellow,
and black almost as much as white.
That felt good
but then I learned God hates me
because I became queerly obsessed
with hot guys,
and not hot girls.
So, God restoratively created me
so He could retributively hate me.
That seemed like poor justice and peace planning to me,
and I was still in fifth grade.
Then I learned that God had given me two extraordinary gifts:
Possibly unmeasurable intelligence,
and so,
my grade-school principal warned
my evangelical farmer parents,
we were not to be surprised
if I was and saw this Earth
in a somewhat different way.
My second gift
was the envy of all good Bible-belting out and still-in teenagers.
I could sing with the angels.
So,
the God of Infinite Love
is my Creator
and I am His Frankenstein Queer
with a mind and singing voice to soar,
full of Grace.
You and I might both be surprised
how long it took to figure out
Something is very wrong with this picture,
and I don't think it is just me.
It was merely everyone else I knew and trusted
in that Bible-belting time.
So I sang for them in full voice
but gave as little voice to my sexuality as possible.
I wrote papers and test responses
in full A+ voice
but told no one
I knew they were asking wrong questions
for me to answer with full-versed integrity,
Free to sing with David and Jonathon
free of magic superstitions
standing in for mythic polypathic wisdom
of Solomon
Not to divide innocent organic Promise
God has conjoined as Love
of and for children,
red and yellow,
black and white,
gay and lesbian,
bisexual and transgender
And, yes, even straight-faced
Bible-belted out and inward Hate,
Supremely Evangelical Christian Colonizing InBred Correctness,
while continuing to give birth
to hidden,
shamed and blamed queer Grace
of a Loving God
polypathically immense,
deep and wide,
future through past
regeneratively just
and peaceful
and wickedly funny
Because if we cannot laugh at our egocentric stupidities,
then we must cry out for cosmic tragedy.
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