Richard Silberg

GODFIGHTER

When I was four  I had my first idea
four  when memory flowers   I
can't remember saying "I'm three"
but I said "four and a half" it seemed
for eons  to various of Granma's
ingratiating suitors 

My idea was this:
I'm a person too  just like these people
I see around me  Tremendous conception
It made sweet sense of the
raw tumbling phenomena  Not just
a fountain of thusness  from then on
I was me

bent on conceiving  obsessed
(abscessed)  with truth

Because clearly  the person I was
was very very special

and truth was not my mother's
'telling the truth'
although I believed in that but
the twang in another dimension
God's eye

Curling back into that plasma
now that my mother is dead
and God's eye sees through me

that fascination of me-ness

I looked at my asshole in a mirror
tried to see up inside

thought
about my soul  how lucky it was
amazing  that my soul
was in me  and not in Mr Lucas
our super  in a doorknob  a cockroach

I tried to fit the interior
this momentousness I felt inside
with the outside  my body
with other bodies  my life
with other lives

Strange and shameful

my smells  my chubby
body with its small tender
limbs

When I looked in a mirror
my eyes stood still
I thought I had weird frozen
eyes

But I also felt enormous

At the age of six I stopped
believing in God
Nay-sayer
my mind rose up like a fist

I loved muscles and teeth 
everything wild and fierce
Animal over vegetable  bees
over wasps  Indians over
cowboys  bulls over bullfighters

I was a Godfighter
fought God in the name of truth
And truth had begun its morph
from God's nonexistent eye
to Science

There was the power
Paleontology  seething the oceans
crawling the land with glyptodons
and stegosaurs  anatomy  physiology
astronomy

Avid for its arguments and its terms
I brandished them  memorized and deployed
them like artillery

So at the beginning
this new person I was turned
warrior and thief of the flame