One killed, three wounded,
the headline said. Obscenely,
momentarily grateful it wasn’t more.
Hating that my brain did that.

What does it take to be a MASS shooting
now? more than 4, more than 14 dead?
Is there a critical mass of dead needed?
Maybe the critical mass of a man-made almost sun
over a Japanese town decades ago.
I think about other kinds of mass shootings.
Oscar Romero, shot during Mass.
One dead, but the course of everything changed
a church turning inward on itself
for fear of an expansive future.
Jews, including, I only know by omission
of their names from future records,
probable distant cousins of mine,
because I was born and raised Jewish,
lined up in front of a pit in Lithuania
and shot, in complete Nazi efficiency
so that their bodies fell into the pit
without piling up too close to the edge
(This scene is not imaginary because a Christian
villager described it completely nonchalantly
to an American soldier in 1945;
we wouldn’t want to have to dig the pit
any bigger then, you know).

The same old same old. Hatred of people
not like us, Jews and gypsies and queers
and none of that has changed since 1945
or 1845 or her and now or whenever;
the current president has only brought out
into the light what has always been there,
what Jews and people of color and queer folx
have always known,
that there are white people who refuse
to acknowledge our humanity, and what
all of us still know and feel in our bodies:
fear of the darkened street after a drink out
when I have gone out sparkly and obvious;
fear of the small town policeman
pulling me over for no real reason;
fear of the people who hold power over my work
whose Facebook page turned out to be full
of white supremacist, anti-gay, anti-Muslim crap;
and nothing bad has ever happened to me personally
except the looks and jeers and namecalling
but you can’t compare trauma and say whose is worse,
fear and contraction have landed in my body
and lie there, festering, waiting to pop up as harsh words
to someone I love dearly, completely without cause;
I want nothing more than to excise them all
all the old words hurled at me, all the looks
from disapproving church ladies about my sparkle
I want to take a deep, long, curved knife
maybe that Biblical pruning-hook
that spears are supposed to get beaten into someday
and carefully carve that pain out of me,
out of my arms and chest and thighs
like the former lover whose pain was so great
she did that over and over, leaving scars on herself,
the only way she could feel alive

I know no way to end this, to stop the cycle
except for all of us, a little bit each day
being kinder to each other,
listening behind the other’s words for their reality

and so I beg you, for the sake of those people
lined up in front of that pit, about to die,
for the sake of the soldiers whose hatred allowed
them to dehumanize people whose religion was different,
for the sake of everyone who has been shot
or beaten or lynched or just given bad looks
for being different, and for all those
doing the shooting and beating and lynching,
see, that’s the really hard part of this,
for all their sakes, tomorrow, and the next day,
and the next, until it becomes in our inner bones
and ligaments and blood an ineradicable habit,
every day for as long as you still are breathing:
just add one more kindness to your repertoire;
restrain the irritation;
smile at the harried mother in the store;
because, I believe, admittedly without any proof at all
except the truth my heart speaks to me
when I lie awake in the middle night
that each smile, each restraint, each kindness
is one less bullet.

I hear my lover’s voice on the phone
it’s been a long time since it was in person
and I hear her exhaustion
the boss from hell is not a joke;
my heart breaks a little
I want to make it better
but I can’t, except, when,
next we are together, I hold her
in my arms, skin to skin,
and kissing her lips, and neck
and breasts and more
show her again that love
is not only a word

Fact: My father died on Valentine’s Day 2001.
Fact: I have been doing a shitload of personal work.
Fact: I barely have it together some days.

Knowing I am going to die
is the last gift of his life
that my father gave me.
If we all really knew that,
if we felt it in our skin,
then we would not take lightly
things that matter,
we would not allow injustice so blithely,
we would not give in at work to pressure to conform ,
we would not fail to make that hard phone call
to a friend who has lost someone dear.
I am going to die
and everyone I love is going to die,
some of them before me, leaving me
heartbroken and grieving,
and it seems completely paradoxical,
but because of this,
I am full of joy now every day,
every day more than the last,
joy in my beloved’s skin against my skin,
joy in the beauty of simple things
sunsets and wasps and drizzle and weeds in the garden
and because of this I can affirm,
which might seem a stretch away from death,
that my beloved has the most magnificent ass.
She has an ass I had only dreamed about before
but never actually seen on a woman.
The rest of her is hot as hell too
but it’s the ass that gets me
and I’ve always been a boob man.

I hear locker room talk about a woman
being a great piece of ass.
I don’t know what’s wrong with those guys.
I don’t want just a piece of her ass.
I want all of it.
The left side, perfectly shaped; the crack,
well, we all know where that leads,
don’t tell me you don’t like that
and then the right side,
just as perfect as the left but very slightly rounder.
No, don’t give me just a piece of ass.
Give me the whole thing,
and yeah, I’m not stupid,
I know that’s a turn of phrase
about getting laid, it just seems
like a particularly unhelpful one.
I say, the whole ass
and nothing but the ass.
She has an ass to die for;

see, that was all about death after all.

One of the women’s empowerment groups
she has worked in for some years
instead of talking about women as beautiful
talk about them as radiant.
I love that. I can barely think of any women
I have ever known who weren’t radiant.
When I was a pastor I did hospital calls
and one time I went to see a woman dying
of liver cancer, and she was there in the hospital bed
holding the hand of her daughter
her skin completely bronze from liver failure,
mostly medicated, and when I read to her
the psalm that starts, The Lord is my Shepherd
her face became radiant. My 84 year old
former piano teacher, when we have lunch now,
is amazingly radiant, still thinking and making music
and continuing her career
as a scholar and musician. The lover I mentioned
the one with the magnificent ass, turns 65 this year
and she is one of the sexiest women I have ever met;
age has nothing to do with radiance,
and I hear over and over from women
when they look in the mirror that they don’t like
this or that about the way they look
and I want to tell you, all the women hearing this
or reading this in this moment. every one of you is blazing
with radiance, in your eyes and bodies and minds
and pussies and hips and bellies
and thighs and arms and hands
and don’t let anyone ever tell you differently
especially men who aren’t vulnerable enough
to know that their power begins in knowing their own death.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t sit around
thinking about funerals all the time.
I’m more likely to be thinking about things she has said to me:
that when I arrive to see her, her skin tingles;
that with me she knows she will climax;
that her desire for me is constant.
I’m more likely to be in the moment,
feeling the warmth of her skin under my finger
as I trace along her spine down to the hollow;
I reach around her and circle her nipple,
she presses back against me, her ass,
the fucking magnificent one, rubbing my cock
she reaches her arm back and circles the back of my neck
with her hand, and with the other
pulls my hand to her pussy, pressing my finger
in between the lips, already wet, and I bring my finger
to my mouth to taste her, anticipating how easily
I will enter her, how her body will move in longing,
how she will sound as I lick her.

Sex and death, death and sex, two sides of the same thing;
I’ll take both, thank you.

I wasn’t expecting
that kissing you
would be so easy

I wasn’t expecting
that putting my hand on your neck
would feel pleasurable

I wasn’t expecting
that I would be
thinking about you

I’m glad for the unexpected

Words have been bombarding me
all week. difficult words, painful words.
my church, the Methodist church, has been the victim
of a carjacking by people who in the end
only want to wreck the car after a brief joyride.
The words coming out of this, heard over and over:
“the practice of homosexuality is incompatible with the Christian faith.’
Men, of course men, standing at microphones and saying publicly,
parents if your child is gay you should pray that they die before the get to puberty
so they don’t ever have sex and don’t go to hell.
or other men suggesting that gay people should be drowned.
what does it even mean to have Christian faith if it leads you to hate.
When I’m feeling a little less awful intermittently
I wonder, how long must one practice homosexuality before you get it right?
But those are the words my church remade again, 40 years on, into church law.
My church has been taken over by bigoted white men,
bigoted white men who cannot abide that my bisexual, sparkly self exists
or for that matter that any gloriously queer person exists
as if it’s contagious, queerness; I say, if only…
There have been consequences for me, but not horrid ones:
no one has thrown me out on the street like so many parents of trans kids have;
no one has beat me up in a parking lot for being out and open;
no one has taken my job away unless you count the last two churches
that fired me for speaking out against their injustice;
I”m pretty fucking safe in my privileged bisexual middle-class life.
but they, my former church, can’t abide me. It should read in the rules:
The practice of honesty and transparency is incompatible with the Christian faith.

So what I have to fucking fight with are words
fighting against the patriarchy,
fighting against the definition of so -called biblical marriage,
that’s their code word for one penis/one vagina;
I ask them, which version of biblical marriage are you going to go for,
one man, a woman and her slave, that’s Abraham,
one man and two sisters, that’s Isaac,
one man and no woman, that’s Jesus,
if, as you insist, he was like us in every way,
then either he had sex or we’re not supposed to do it at all;
or maybe if you’re a teenage boy
you would go for one man, 600 wives
and 1200 concubines, that’s Solomon.
yeah, fucking ignorant people who read what they want to
in the Bible and ignore the other parts.
They take 6 little passages and make them be the whole story,
and I wonder, why those, why are they not on a rampage
against people who wear clothes with two kinds of fibers mixed
because the Bible calls that an abomination too,
why is it lesbian and gay people that you are so afraid of
and not the clothes you buy at Walmart and Neiman’s;
why aren’t they all gung-ho about selling their daughters into slavery
cause that’s right there next to the parts they quote about us.
And there are already bishops in the Methodist church expelling out gay pastors
and two young lesbian couples in a Methodist college campus ministry
tried to kill themselves
and this is what you have sown, you hateful bigoted white men,
and I am only hitting the tip of the iceberg of my anger,
at bigoted white men who shoot down young black men
in their grandmother’s backyard for being black with phone
and who stop my dear friend who is part Hispanic
every time she crosses back into the US
and one time strip searched her
‘because you have a suspicious name’
and every other thing that all of you know about,
every act of hate.

What I’ve been doing here is called a lament in the Bible.
Laments are for those times where the current is intermittent
and the light bulb is flickering and we don’t know
how to turn it on all the way or what the fuck to do next.
Laments are for when everything has turned to shit.
I always think of that cartoon that has a guy asking Jesus,
when are you going to do something about injustice,
and Jesus answers the guy, funny, I was going to ask you the same question;
but the people who wrote the Bible didn’t buy into hopelessness
and so all the laments end with hope except one, psalm 88,
and I have been reading it because I am not fucking ready to have hope;
I am only ready to sit in grief and let my lovers hold me and comfort me
and to finally own publicly yes I am bisexual and queer and gender queer;
if my queer clergy friends can risk everything to demand justice from our church
then the least I can do is be honest in public about who I am

but that damn hope shit keeps coming back even when I don’t want it
because even sitting in lament I know, beyond any doubt
that I am beloved of the Divine and everyone else is,
everyone hearing these words and everyone who never will
everyone who loves someone and everyone who doesn’t
everyone straight, queer, trans, cis, nerdy, handsome,
everyone afraid or courageous, vulnerable or shut down
everyone I have not in some way named out of my blind spots
you are all blossoming, unfolding into the brilliance of the Divine in you;
bigots and haters want to hand you a pair of pliers and say,
it’s in your best interest to cut the wires to the bulb,
but if we can all remember that we are Beloved
we can instead all put in a little bit of extra current
and the bulb will flicker just a little less.

I read some poems a while back
at an open mic in a bar
and I sucked.

Lots of ways to say that. One friend I had
who is very prim and proper, wouldn’t use the word suck
things “Hoovered” or sometimes
if she was really upset, “that vacuumed”
I could have said, I blowed.
But let’s stick with the word suck.

I like that word. It feels like something I can own.
I’ve sucked at lots of things
in my life. Being a school-teacher,
being a husband, being calm and secure in meetings.
Sucking is something I’m used to.

I didn’t used to be used to sucking.
My ex-wife said, women don’t like to do that
they just do it so they won’t lose their man,
But even at the time I knew she was wrong
because I had a girlfriend, before I met her,
who couldn’t wait to get my zipper open.
So yeah, I like to get sucked.
and I am with women who like to do it,
thanks be to God.

I bet you think that’s an odd thing to go to,
when I’ve switched to talking
about oral sex, thanks be to God.

I used to be a pastor.
I say used to be, because the powers that be
in the church I was part of
found out that I like, among other things,
being sucked, that I liked fucking,
that on occasion I liked flogging someone
and tying them up, consensually, of course,
and a lot more, and I’m single,
and the rule-book says single people have to be celibate,
and I said, on my blog, that’s a stupid rule
and I’m not going to follow it
and so I broke their rules and
they did what they had to do
and asked me to resign, and I did
because I’m trying to live authentically
and I don’t fit their rules.

But anyway, I like sex and I am in love
with a few amazing women,
being polyamorous in my orientation,
and the church is messed up
in my opinion, (which is only that)
about sex and about love and about real intimacy.
It’s one thing to live your conviction
that sex is good and sacred even outside [gasp]
the narrow bounds of hetero marriage,
but it’s another to say so publicly
and I went too far in that to be ignored,
so I am no longer a United Methodist deacon.

When I was in seminary, I went to a Presbyterian seminary,
right about then the Presbys were arguing
about whether gay and lesbian people
could be ordained, and they voted yes,
and half of my class came out.
And some churches took their toys and went home,
left the denomination, and how stupid is that
because the Presbyterian church uses a call system
for their pastors, if they need a pastor,
people apply and are interviewed and hired,
and no one can force a church
who doesn’t want to to hire a queer pastor.
But they left, and the same thing
happened in the Lutheran and Episcopal churches,
and is about to in the Methodist church,
and they all wonder, they spend hours and weeks
wondering and studying and having conferences about
why young people don’t want to come to church
or why gay and lesbian people don’t want to come to church,
and that is such a waste of time, it’s totally obvious
that no one would want to go someplace where the leadership
doesn’t and can’t ever look like them;

so I was in seminary at that time, and I saw
a tee-shirt that one of my classmates had,
and on the front at the top it said:
Everything Jesus said about Sex,
and there were two Bible verse listed, two,
and on the back it said at the top:
Everything Jesus said about money, greed, and the poor,
and the whole back of the shirt was covered in tiny print
with Bible verses, over 200,
and still, the church in general is way more
worried about who fucks who
than who is fucking over who.

But I am convinced, from everything in the Bible, even,
that the Divine is way more worried about who is fucking over their
sisters and brothers than who is fucking who consensually.
I think this because I think the Divine is about love,
the Divine is love, and love, at least among humans
and that is all we can really know,
(because anything we say about the Divine is mostly incorrect)
among humans, love craves to be expressed;
and if the Divine really is about love
and really is, as Christian theology says,
three persons in one, in eternal conjoined bliss,
mutually holding one another completely in union,
then the Divine is polyamorous
and having one continual creation-long energetic orgasm.
You can see, probably, if you ever went to church
how this could be considered false doctrine.

And so, because of all this, I am no longer a fucking preacher
but I am now, and will always be, a preacher of fucking.
Can I get an Amen?
[that’s an inside joke for any
of my former colleagues who might
be reading this…]

Some churches desire
to make disciples
I desire they allow the Divine
to pitch a tent in people’s hearts

Some men believe
being vulnerable is weak
I desire they learn
that self knowledge is true strength

Some women I love
let the past win
I desire that they
feel today’s breeze on their skin

I am alive.
I am in love and I am alive.
I am in love with three completely amazing women
and I am alive; I am a fully gender-queer, pansexual, polyamorous man
and I always have been, even when I denied that;
and for anyone denying some part of themselves,
out of fear or shame or guilt, I ask you to let that go,
and be fully your beautiful alive self.
While I write this I am sitting in my house, the house that once was the seat
of my marriage, which I never expected to end, which was
at least partly, good and happy, and partly terrible and anxious and scary
and I survived that and I am alive.
I am theologically educated, and desire to share
my direct experience of the Divine with everyone
and I have the tiny little degree card from seminary in my wallet
to prove that when I am talking to people in bars,
and in spite of everything wrong with religion I am alive.
I am a church musician who doesn’t give a flying fuck
about the church but who still wants,
when I can, to move your soul with beauty,
and I am alive most completely when I am making music.
I am an ally to everyone who is oppressed or shamed
for being sexual and alive
and in love with whoever they want to be in love with.
I was kicked out of the church I served for 16 years
as a pastor for having sex as a single man
because they are so afraid of pleasure
that they can’t handle it except by controlling it,
and for promoting false doctrine, which consists
of telling the world pleasure is our birthright, and I am alive.
I love women, everything about them, their feel and scent and kisses
and minds and hearts open to me, and I have been,
more than once now, in deep like with a lovely man and I am alive.
I am alive all the way, in my skin and my muscles
and my fluids and my bones,
in where my energy starts at the root
and where it channels out the top of my head.
I am alive in this moment, right now,
and right now, and right now.
I am dom to an amazing woman who is my sub,
and Daddy to another who is my Princess,
and if you think you know anything
about power exchange relationships,
I can tell you from direct experience
that most of what you have read is wrong.
Three years ago this 4th of July I was despairing of my life,
hating being with my now e-wife,
and too afraid to do anything about it;
it took her hitting me, over and over and over,
for me to get the balls to leave.
Yesterday I went to pick up a taco
and went by the place near me
where you can sell plasma for cash
and I remembered that two years ago
I was planning to start doing that
to make ends meet, and now two years later
I have more work than I can manage all at once,
I have manifested the life
I only dreamed about ever before
and only in hindsight
can I see each little step and challenge
and barely courageous step that got me here.
I have woken up from a deep 30 year sleep
of complacency and despair
and I am alive.
I am here right now, seeing each radiant one of you in your place
feeling your energy, feeling the world,
and I am no longer willing
to be asleep, to be half-dead;
and I want more than anything else in this world
for every one of you who is asleep
to wake the fuck up and be alive.
If you have even one bit of passion
for your life then you can’t help
but have this same mission
to wake up the world.
I am, this whole past year,
for the first time maybe in my life,
here, fully present, in the moment,
and in love, and in pleasure.
I am alive. Are you?

I wake up at 3am.
It’s not the first time;
3:13 and I are well acquainted,
3:27 is an old friend.
I turn on the rain sound app,
fake thunderstorms on my beside table,
recorded rain on some other sidewalk.
My skin remembers other nights,
ones with yours against mine,
your hair across my chest, silken,
or was that her fingertips,
Pressing into my arm, barely tightening.
In the middle night, in the darkness,
all my lovers accumulate into memory;
my desire for you not exactly physical,
the connection between us not a function
of blood vessels engorging, but memory,
and in my mind’s eye,
I hear your pleasure, each moment of that,
reduced and concentrated into sweet syrup,
imagining all of you, together, heads on my single shoulder,
as rain rolls off my roof to the ground,
and sleep comes back, finally.
In the morning, eyes gritty,
I text each of you, one at a time,
Sweetheart, Beloved, Lover;
another day opens, another chance
to move closer to each of you,
and undo together all the past wounds
that make us think
there is any space at all between us.