It’s not so much that I stopped believing in god
As I ran out of things to say
To someone who never speaks
Or at least not in any kind of way
That we would consider essential to a healthy and loving relationship.
But really the idea that the creator of all this
Would somehow desire a personal relationship with the tiny part of this that I am
Is kind of like suggesting
That I should or could somehow have an intimate relationship with subatomic hadrons
Who live for merely 10-23 second.
Only that comparison actually vastly overestimates
My significance
And vastly underestimates
Any so-called god.
And maybe Christians need a 6000 year old earth
So that their god will be small enough
For them to be noticed.
But as for me
I worship the fungal networks
Who distribute food equally between all the trees of the forest
Otherwise each kind of tree
Would only share
With their own kind.
As for me
I worship the Influenza HA gene
Which has evolved for evolvability
And which exhibits codon bias
Within the amino acids that make up the HA1 epitopes
And in this way
It constantly gives rise to sudden, novel, shocking, and enduring forms of life.
As for me
I worship the Hydrogen
Which was born in the moment the universe burst forth
When nothingness orgasmed
And said that it was good.
And now this Hydrogen makes up approximately 10% of me
It is infused with my consciousness
It is infused with its own consciousness
We now share a consciousness
And when my body that I am rots the Hydrogen while rise
And some of it will exit the atmosphere
And some of it will travel
Back and out and down the Milky Way
(Or what the Navajo call Yikaisdaha—That Which
Awaits the Dawn
And what in Sanskrit is called
the Ganges of the Sky
And what the Anishinaabe call Jiibay Kona—the
Spirit Path)
Perhaps some of my consciousness will go with the consciousness that this Hydrogen
Has had since the dawn of time.
Because where is the line between the “I” that I am, and the “I” that the Hydrogen is?
And if it seems odd to suggest that Hydrogen has an “I”
Surely that is no more odd than saying the same of me.
(And Influenza, too, is both an “I” and not an “I”—it is so adept at adopting various genetic sequence clusters, playing around with its own genes, taking over genes from host cells, and from other Influenza virions that are present in a host cell but who have come from a different strain, that one cannot even properly speak of Influenza as a species but must refer to it as a quasispecies wherein various clades become more or less dominant but wherein there is not enough shared genetic information to be able to speak of Influenza as a proper species—and I think that the “I” and “not I” that I am, composed of so much star dust, so much bacteria, so much archaea, so much gas that has been around since the dawn of time, so many elements that have passed through innumerable other life forms, so many quarks and muons and neutrinos and positrons, that I think perhaps I, myself, am a quasispecies.)
But, anyway, as for me
I worship Jessica
With her fingers in my mouth
And her sweat on my skin
And her hair falling across her breast
As she parts her lips
And breathes.