DETHRONING SHADOWS

I have been worn thin by religion. It has stripped the skin from my muscles, ripped the meat from my bones. Politics have left me drowning in a sea of shoulds and should nots, in an ocean of too much and not enough. Politicians eat lies with a side of shifty eyes for dinner. They feed scraps of scandal to their dogs and ask us to give them our hearts while the underpaid maids stand in the corner of the kitchen, fricasseeing something throbbing and purple suspiciously heart shaped. I want to make a bonfire from the self-help manuals, put the pompous preachers and politicians on mute. Sing naked, dancing in the light of the rising flames with my brothers and sisters who understand that a horse never reads books about how to be a better horse, that the sky doesn’t cry because it feels guilty for clouding sometimes, that the tides do not order themselves to freeze stop being what they were born to be. Guilt is a function of a terrorized mind, and we, my loves, are victims of such terror we know nothing else, living as we have for eons in the shadows of tyrants who claim to know better than our sacred selves. The monsters on the cave wall are hand shadows cast by mortal men invoking gods millions of miles high to horrify us into submission. Stand up. Cowering before shadows does not become you. There is no distance between you and God. God is in the air you breathe, the light you see. The creator dances playfully, intelligently, in your very DNA. You were born knowing how to be human. You can never be anything else.