So I went to--
I grew up in Midland, Texas.
It's the Permian Basin in West Texas,
and I went to a school called Trinity.
And I was there from the time I was five
till I graduated from high school,
and I feel like I only recently kind of came to terms with--
I guess like what I'll call my Anglican flashbacks.
So this came out of that.
It's called "The Doors to Trinity."
The doors to Trinity.
I never lost 'em.
Here they are, scratch handled, sweat gunked.
I didn't learn to reach higher.
I just did, first on my toddling toes.
But I did learn to borrow: rides from strangers,
how to dress or laugh, cash stacked
in aluminum foil meant for villages
too far away for me to care.
Yeah, I did that.
Snuck off and unwrapped myself.
For a card to call a boy in another state who
didn't want me.
Rings that gave my knuckles grass colored scars.
A journal to carry my sins in.
I ached and stole and swallowed.
I didn't notice all the lesions I hadn't meant to hoard.
I stopped wanting to be held, or told.
Yesterday was tomorrow.
I was gentler then.
Not yet hollowed, but always unkempt, always unauthored.
First the tornado cubbyhole damp with forged permission slips,
then the locker packed with pens.
I chewed into saliva twizeled plastic fodder
papered with magazine cutouts of boys
grinning in a different color.
Then I began to rub out the foulest parts of me
until I was vellum.
But I stayed smudged.
A blue pat of drugstore eye shadow, brush softened.
You know how it all stretches and slows,
how one minute you're falling on your diapered ass
for the first time, and then the next mistake
kept you thirsting for more?
I became crucifix and spear, the cut and colored glass,
and hymns I drank but never at home.
Even then I wanted to stick out my tongues
for any form of leavening.
I am chosen, I prayed, I was born.
I took a right, a left, and another left.
I'm sometimes late but I still love
to run a palm all alone around the shining altar.
I still believe I could be, like you said, anything I wanted.
When I did, the light never seemed to falter.
I always did want to sit up--
I always did want to sit with my feet
up in those high thrones I called fancy chairs.
How fat with love my wild, orange-scented hair.
Brave disciple, do not be afraid.
Look, oh look, the stained child of God is still smiling.