God

Today I saw God. Walking in the woods I had come across a path. In the gravel dug up by cars, lay the carcass of a snake, its body split in two by the crushing weight of a tire. The tail was flat and dry, with a slight curve, microscopic scales peeling off. The body had taken the shape of the little pebbles it had been pressed upon. The head was unharmed, and the empty eyes in a thin brittle white scull stared up with the absence of a distracted mind. In the quiet of the woods, the dry leaves of autumn only disturbed by the wind, I saw the remembrance of soldiers lying low; the anticipation of the next round of bombings, the fear, the rush to survive, the exhaustion of the prior days, and the ever expanding scope of war; the fire bombings of Nazi Germany, of Japan, the death camps of Europe and Cambodia; the slaughters of Africa with men using children as pawns of power and fear.

Scream the raw horror of human life, the raw horror of those same humans clinging to moral ideals, singing praise. I saw His disciples, flying into towers as birds, as planes; Chile! I saw the devastation of nature to profit, entertain or perish of disease by those striving to escape misery, the futile ever increasing circle of corporate consumption; the absurdity of profitability; the gluttonous, selfish, wasteful freedom of SUVs; the glory of feeding the millions with trash food. God can indeed only be our image; futile, vain and horrific.

And I looked back down at the skinny, dry, flattened carcass wondering when I would be joining it in silence, mingling our decaying DNA in an erotic burst of combinatory possibilities.