¡pןɹoʍ ʎɯ oʇ ǝɯoɔןǝʍ ~ Period 1 Creative Writing

Farewell, dear bloggers

2010-06-18T20:05:00.002-04:00

Alas, this is the last post this blog will get out of me, but no need to worry! Peter (Reptar) Granville's poetry blog has only changed locale to a shinier, sparklier html,

http://7-seventy-7.blogspot.com/

You're probably wondering what's up with the 7s, so I'll just lazy copy+paste the intro on the blog.

"Hey world! So I've got this goal / benchmark / lifestyle to write 777 pieces of poetry, prose, and anything that creeps along in between by my high school graduation in June 2012, and this is where it all goes down. Maybe I'll make something decent out of it, maybe you'll be reading the literary equivalent of bad mashed potatoes. Who knows! All I hope is that we all get something out of it. I'm doing this for you, I'm doing this for me, but I can never really tell what I'm doing."

See, that's my goal. 777 pieces by June 2012. Who knows if I'll make it, but however far I get you'll find it right there. So this doesn't really qualify as a goodbye message, but rather a reminder of where to find me from now on. First post is June 18th and it should be one per day, so check back in a few weeks and there'll be some decent work in there. Job well done, Creative Writing, and I'll see ya 'round. *peace sign*

Just a little something

2010-06-07T05:38:00.007-04:00

Lady Sedona

Before me, the world

Blinks behind stripes of gold.

My mind has been broken, and yet,

Peace has its restitutions.

II.

Twelve-thousand sparks-

Golden skyflowers sprouting out of her awakening,

Dissolving the lonely mountaintop, drowning out our broken edges.

I look for her at sunrise. I see two. I count one.

Slipstream dove: from you, I learned her iambic heartbeat.

Poetry has no words. I think she knows that.

Infinite sparks, in her music, her waves, her sunscape.

She has known, perhaps always. Forgetting is colorless.

(How quickly we disappear)

(Sunrises and sunsets have always looked the same to me.

Dear Misperception, our shadows grow long.)

III.

My confrontation with a man named Why:

He and I meet to deal cards from time to time, it feels, though I believe we’ve never stopped. Draining me of my prayers, he asks his question, and I retrieve my breath. There is silence when he speaks, something cryptic about his simplicity. I tell him: Pain is the pill I keep under my tongue, for later, if Love I can still keep lodged in my throat. While placing his four-of-a-kind between his wine and my acrimony, he smokes four words: “She will be gone.” I bite my lip, but find air to tell him that if a moment in the sun is all I seek, a life of night is welcome into my fate. Before laying down my Jack of Hearts, I sculpt my poem, tattoo it in his back:

Not.

(His four words still hang in the air, gray and complacent, waiting for someone to speak, then drift westward)

IV.

I’ve found religion to be the art of believing (and in you, I’ve found belief),

For poetry thou art, and unto poetry thou shalt return.

The skies are paved with petals of your silver soul-

(These roads trip atop you)-

Still, you have made me wince at the sunset.

Behind your back, I have hidden- between blank lines of poetry

That speak of a lily, in tongues that speak only of you-

I have pretended to discover the sky, to your smiling belief.

Eight faces with one mind; the progression of love is not my abstract.

I'm hoping you haven't read me unreversed.

Your house is built on this art. I am a nomad.

You extend to me- myself- lost in a glass box with triangle insides.

You were amused by the eight-sided cage of echoes, like a glass island in your palm.

(Right angles could never tell me right from wrong)

Because the ocean is a sky untouched by waves,

We cast my mind into the sea (you said it looked like a sphere in its airborne nativity).

These waves bleed ink, black and white, yet I drowned in gold twisted in brown.

Mindlessness, synthesis, and transparent love in the ocean sunrise that I never saw coming.

Eight sparks- a glass box, broken from within.

(Love in the Sedona Sunrise)

(I drowned in the sea, in the tears of the moon in the earth’s cupped hands.

With you here, they will not drip through.

Without you, I will follow them.)

VI.

She’s unraveling incense and pretense, barricades and serenades, calmly exhaling the sublime.

I'm prodding patterns in an oppressed rhyme, praying they're conveying my decaying in time.

She's wading in mindpools that always seem spilled.

I'm digging through February graves that were never really filled.

She’s got me living in unreality, inside walls of dreamstone.

I'm learning that love is something hearts never hone.

She's got the gaze to make the fibers of the sun unfurl.

I've got scars between stars, they spell my life:

(About a Girl)

VII.

I've been through the desert, with no line of sight,

Chained to an origami shadow- I thought I knew why it stays beneath me.

Broken glass images drift along the yellow stillness-

I lift my eyes for this new shade of silence.

Out of a window, gliding through the air like dust, reaches your golden hand.

Your grasp liberates, addicts, blooms me.

Oasis. Sanctum. Nirvana. Sedona.

You left, but left behind rain (the sweetest reign).

VIII.

There is a girl,

Who stepped out of the sunrise, into me, today.

There are eight colors in her eyes (and we all shine gold).

There is perfection in peace, and peace in her.

There is a way to fly, if this love stays in the air.

There is a radiant, sanctified, fiery, magnetic, blinding, rising, ultraviolet, golden-striped Girl

The one that I adore

Like no other before

Who is what none will ever be.

And the blog-posting restarts... now

2010-04-15T22:44:00.001-04:00

Lily

Between life and death,
I saw why I’d lived.

She grows on the peninsula
That squeezes gently into a jungle of waves
And as you dive
Into the sleeping, dreaming lakebed mist,
From which we are peacefully born,
And into which we will peacefully sink,
She seems to stem out of the shipwrecked clouds
Nestled between the real and the right.
Dragging holes in the silt,
I absorb the blinking blooms of liquefied turquoise,
Ignited with seeds of the sun,
As they graze the iron bars behind my own.
Solidified fire pulsating in her heart
Radiates warm beads of serenity
Into the ambient wind,
Who seems to break apart his flow
As he, alongside my spirit, weaves through her hair-
As if he means to freeze
And inhale her breath, or image,
And then twists into a hurricane
As he sprints on in ecstasy.
With a fire and the seas swimming in her mind,
Her gaze floats on the cliffs that flank at her shadow,
Over which the green glow of smoke and lights
Drowns with war vibes and darkens the sky,
And the sun dims as she sighs gently,
As if sighing for the world forever will make her more of its mother.
Her fiery guardian eclipses with the mountains
As darkness dips into the mist, like a rain of ink into the sea,
And slinks up us like ivy.
As a moon rolls about in a velvet sky,
Reflecting a brighter light beside me,
Granting the heavens their glow,
She blooms smooth, violet petals of rose into the round stillness-
They catch each other, collapse upon each other,
Stacking to form the night sky- the darkness only seems dark.
With every revolving dawn,
Her love, my disease and remedy, life within death,
Contrives the sky from her bliss.
Yet today, the sunrise seeps through the rocks beneath us, pink and unseen,
And the weeks of the moon pass as the shadows entwine us to dissolve into one with themselves,
As she and I are one in each other.
The mist expands, slipping, synthesizing with my bloodstream,
And as all else but her becomes one vision of hazy surrealism,
My spirit bounds forward to transcend my eyes
And plunge into the mist of an unknown reality,
Of her, and of no one besides her.
At the speed of my blood, exceeding light,
My spirit becomes frozen by the silt, chaining me from transfiguration,
And by the halting image of purple flames clawing at the horizon.
Beside me, as real in this world as much as the next,
Her back snaps in thunder at the knowledge of what would soon pass.
After millennia of watching the dance of the waves,
The cliffs begin to mimic the flow, the landslide descends down its back,
As she breathes in fire with the air, entombed in spirit,
Arching into the earth that made her, and into the earth that enveloped her.
All I know is gone, and all I see is still.

Revelation came in solemn erasing
As the lost reality fades out of itself,
As the world is uprooted, as the clouds swimmingly return into the cosmos,
As the velvet sky wilts, falling leaves of shadow descend, the Autumn of eternal winter,
The earth vanishing in blankets of corporeal dusk,
And I, incinerating into void, am no more than the wind.
The black waves, dissolving me as they rise past my feet, drape up the mountains,
Yet, as I float, I find myself melting into mist, transfigured,
Unified with the mist that is this sublime world, alone,
Besides the figure of her,
Living, standing tall, and my spirit,
Growing near.

Indigo and Violet

2010-02-07T13:59:00.008-05:00

When I think of words coming together to form a story, I wonder what colors glisten as two words, like bubbles, merge- that fragment of a second when the independent meaning must pop itself to become something bigger and greater than itself. Is it chemistry? Yes, but I wish it wasn't. There must be another word for the covalent junction of these two unlike elements, when radioactivity pulsates through the fortuitous folds of the page, channels through the ink, and boils over into the crags of my thumb. I've always been fond of fountain pens that way.

Two words may be ionically written- Extravagant after a The, and all meaning is leeched off of The to fuel Extravagant's beauty. Yet, grammar gazes on from a dusty window miles away, blowing gentle kisses to The, the love it keeps to herself. That is the extravagant nature of the language: no phrase floats by without a kiss to each cheek.

The story, though I know not of its shape, of bubbles or pyramidal tetrahedrons, ought not to be broken for popped, unless to form something bigger and greater. I have no care for excerpts: what can be done with the shiniest slice of a soap bubble? Prose may be blown inside different winds than poetry; she is more of a poetic balloon, small grimy words that stretch and find a way to float into the sky. Prose is more of a bubble, more of a concrete shape- and yet, from a distance, I wouldn't see the difference either.

A Haiku or Two

2010-01-30T17:54:00.003-05:00

Spinal Congruence

In disregard to

Federal policy, my

Globe spins in circles.

Daydreams, far starcast,

Breathe in the life swept from me,

Lungs left with daydread.

Ride behind eyes of

Adrenalized existence-

That Being lives well.

Of Diamonds and Darkness (or, The Book of Contra-Genesis)

2010-01-30T14:41:00.006-05:00

[Some notes beforehand: this is waaay long, 5 pages printed. You were warned. I designed this so each line or pair of lines could be its own statement, independent of the storyline. In that way each line is in my perspective, but collectively the story isn't]

Mine is an ambiguous world

That precedes the stars.

Under distant leaves,

Adam harkened the foremother of dawns

While the elastic conscience of billions

Shattered with the diamonds in metamorphotic chaos.

Dig deep in your ears, for the sound still rings:

The rise of your contra-Genesis.

I was born flying-

My flaming wings accustomed to life

Within a helical cascade:

Nativity at ten-thousand feet.

Like a flashing watchdog glance of God,

Cast adrift into oblivion,

That drifted along wrong paths into tangible space.

I am the anomaly.

As I wander this virgin soil,

Lotus flowers,

Shining free violet in the streaming sun,

Wilt beneath the weight of my wispy ink shadow

And the smoke of demise

Burns so sweet on my throat;

Tastes like my tea leaf

Stemming from the fruits of disaster.

Your watchman God looks down at his brush-

This is not his art

And I not his patron.

The forests are wise.

My niche is worlds away from this peace.

The trees know I am to be the craftsman of hate-

The nomad of realms that torch to dust beneath my step,

The beetle eye through which all history and space will flow-

For their leaves wither and fall to dirt.

Though they may rot there into nonbeing,

The ground cannot be poisoned by my exhale.

I yearn for the same,

But how can I escape my own breath?

When I encompass all around me,

Is nothing about me avoidable?

The answers slip past my mind

Of B-grade thoughts.

Does my head spiral

Or does the Earth spin?

For neither feels right.

I feel it.

I’m no member of this harmonious world.

My eyes pierce the façades of darkness

Behind which sins crouch, starve,

And flourish with an anti-life not meant for this world.

My ears dance as they hear doves’ cries of terror

And a thousand bones cracking like thunder

…But all my eyes see are twigs.

I grasp your arm, if misfortune treks your path,

And I feel no flesh-

Only the hot blood that jets through your levee veins.

It lovingly twists through my fingers

In the instinctive way light embraces the angels.

Why is my sea barreled into such feeble bottles?

And if I have any purpose for this world,

Would it not be to uncork them?

Behind all his convoluted politics,

Yours is a god of gavels and brooms,

Ever-sweeping the porch of purgatory,

And of diamond-crested spectacles that search only for darkness.

Theocratic dictatorship stands atop this wall-

Every brick path I take builds itself into a locked gate.

His sight sees through the petals

Growing gradually blind as I spider by.

This cannot be, and neither can I.

Under today’s sun,

Blinding me with the light of all eternity pressed into one beam,

I cannot see to run as the wall falls down atop me.

Perhaps by that gavel,

Perhaps because the land taught itself to purge out venom,

I slipped into a new device, concocted all for me.

Night.

In this cloud I cry caged,

And howl prayers to the black tide,

On a barren islet that floats in tune with the sun,

Eternally tied to the dark side of the globe.

Hard as I try, the sun won’t rise for me.

Five thousand braids of diamond,

Whose brilliance is not constrained to the light,

Bind me to each mole of sand,

Rooting down into his gemstone courtroom.

As I budge, the magisterial sand twists about me;

I feel it writhe past skin to mold my bones instead,

In the way of five thousand beetles.

I am like them, but seldom less regal.

Yet even your emblem madman, made divine,

Acknowledges respect for the antagonist.

If I retain any will, that reluctant river shall not flow both ways.

The darkness wrinkles my flesh like ten lifetimes in the sea,

My eyes pinned to the folds of my chest.

The turbulent ant of my worries,

Hunger tackles me like the neurotic tornado

Whose company I might slay for.

All I am, tripping atop the edge-

A compound-existence with suffocation.

If I must succumb to your linear logic

A thousand days slinked past.

Beneath the gravity of all his artillery,

These cracks are but scars on the mask of this urchin titan.

They spell my revelation:

The universe must convulse, until its inside is out,

To make us gods stumble.

Purgatory is nothing but a standing lesson.

The senses are the last mortality to be disrobed;

Lust and greed close in for long-foreseen reinstatement.

A relic of infancy wafts through my mind- fruit?

Nomad mirages of elephants plucked from gardens,

Of rivers overturned on their backs,

Find refuge behind my eyes

All times they find themselves homeless.

But my wolf snout ratifies this anomaly.

The wafting stream leads beneath the beetles-

My toes retrieve an apple, grown within barren sand,

Charcoal black as night.

This is the working of an adverse Nature.

The rotten peel stings my lips,

Yet kisses it with enamored compliance,

As do I.

Is this love by default?

Within that taste, anarchy sweeps my veins dry.

I sweat ghost and god.

As my fingers extend, stretching out my heart’s last pump,

The diamond braids burst like lead.

And I stumble, to lay back,

To gaze up as my eyes purge out the mortal blood,

And I ingest the toxic beauty of shadow,

To fill my veins,

To brand it my emblem.

My prosecutor did not see the reins on this beast.

The diamond braids flex, for we share liberation,

And still bound to my spine, they lift me up,

And my legs become powdery ash, crumble into the sand.

Carried by spider legs of diamond,

I climb atop the wall of theocracy,

So chaos may rot it away.

Anarchy snarls at a leader,

Yet there is nothing that does not bear a mother.

This kind of sin, my self-exalted brew, sits in my lap

And becomes cemented to all who grasp it.

As a fragile sun rises,

I wade through the Indus sky, dragging the languid moon on a leash,

Pushing away the night sky, my rejuvenating bed sheet.

The seas rise to stop me, and yet I float higher.

A woman’s swaying voice prays in the deciduous distance-

In intrigued disgust,

I pull upon that pugnacious rope until the shores are met.

At last arms reduce to ash,

Cracking until they convert into black wind.

My hollow torso follows in turn,

As neck and skull evaporate in smoke.

The anomalistic body has been shed by the snake,

Slithering onward to forge

From lotus flowers and smoke, apples and sand:

A hatred,

A history,

A human race

All my own.

Counter-creation breathes through these lungs.

This Isn't Really a "Poetry Blowout" anymore...

2009-12-10T07:42:00.005-05:00

Six Ways of Looking at the Highest of Clouds

[reduced from 10 for the sake of space]

I bet clouds act like old men playing chess in the park,
With no need to make a scene,
And chortle incessantly when a funny-looking dog strolls by
Until their dentures fall out.
I hope that’s where meteors come from.

It’s prodded my mind halfway through a race
How nice it would be to glide as a cloud.
But I come to realize, perching themselves atop the universe,
Effortlessly cruising over pristine peaks, beaches and bluffs,
Clouds must have been runners in the last life.

On sultry May days
I hope they’ve enjoyed the company of my mind,
Perched high in the clouds,
As much as I’ve enjoyed theirs.

They always sneak their way into every landscape, every picture,
And wiggle into the eye of your camera.
They never scream and yell for your attention,
But I can't think of anything more divine
And worthy of all my eyes' life.
I bet their birthdays are in November
When the sedulous sun has drowsily rolled over to a slant-
Clouds always seem to dazzle me most, sparkle most,
Seem to make the auburn earth seem all the more atrophied
When they flare purple and pink, collapse in November glee.

I’ve never liked astronauts much.
When we can look down upon the tops of the clouds,
A bolt is loose in supporting the universe.
Anomalies tug on ramparts that should rise high
And my relief is unrivaled once they’ve returned:
Safe feet graze safe ground, their eyes and mouths thanking God,
And the clouds’ delight reflects back
With the courtesy to smile blue, white, and yellow.
I think that means 'You’re Welcome.'

The blood in your veins will someday be a cloud,
And I wonder why we tend to look down when we cry
Within the lament of loss.
Those who have gone their destined way
Are smiling from the clouds, and shower their blessing from above.
For that, I know:
There’s something more to the cool rain that mingles with tears.

Blog Poetry Blowout, Day 6

2009-12-05T14:29:00.007-05:00

Nothing Special

Squeeze my idle mind for all it's worth,

And this poem drips out (sorry for all the pulp)-

Can you tell it's non-concentrate?

Yet I write because it seems right today.

No one else seems to hear when I ask myself,

"How cold were we before?

When we're warmed by a blanket of December ice"

And I still stuggle to speak when no one listens.

A flower blooms saffron and skobeloff

From black and brown,

And I wonder what she's been writing this time.

I can't imagine what else would breathe life into dirt

Besides a pen, gracing some page.

What she does with Caesar's alphabet:

It's Alchemy if I ever saw it,

But I never quite got the gist of Chemistry

Their sublime poetry leans over,

whispers in my poem’s disfigured ear,

“My mommy’s smarter than your daddy!”

And my poetry turns red, arches in shame,

And wonders,

Was God just doing the best he could too?

Blog Poetry Blowout, Day 5

2009-11-30T21:16:00.005-05:00

Confucius Says...
[Fortune Cookie Poetry]

The hour’s arrived
To allow your heart
To lead you

Wings will wither,
Bleed blue when life’s black,
And solely soar
Under one sun at a time
Your soul extends, transcends-
Your legs and limbs
Won't comprehend

Minds are so meek
They glamorize the lies,
Terrorize the wise,
Abscise, anathemize-
Hearts poetize,
Baptise, cicatrize
And only souls will
Open your eyes
Minds covet a castle of copper
Not a heart of gold

Instinct is extinct
In the end, just a blend
Of ignorance, subsistence,
And what luck and logic we have
It might lead you north one-fourth of the time
Though only your soul
Knows which way to go

Blog Poetry Blowout, Day 3

2009-11-27T22:25:00.002-05:00

[I'm in need of lots of criticism on this]

Rag Harp

Part 1

Hawking the moths with a wine-stained cloth
The barkeep squints as the angels trace their table
The reticent crowd sits coolly with bloodless ennui
And a pistol strides in glum and finds bliss in some rum
Torn soles of 40s boots, a smoke, and his best black cloak
Greet the 50s crowd tonight by drunk candlelight
The piano sits vacant, the spotlight’s impatient
The toothless mug of a king, just a man and his strings
He welcomes them gladly, some stare back madly
All in all, it don’t mean much at all
So his strings chant their dance, the harp hums cadence
For the race who can’t find their place in the empty world
The homeless, the loveless, the shadows and voiceless
Yet their worries cut loose 'round the black man’s blues
The streets call him Rag Harp- feel his words, born from the breeze
Cause his world is all your’s needs

Blog Poetry Blowout, Day 2

2009-11-26T17:14:00.004-05:00

This Morning I Saw

[Violence Poetry, the rhyme scheme got randomly

lost for the second stanza besides internal rhyme,

sorry 'bout that]
.
This morning I saw our thick-booted law
Rip through the cords of an eye
Each turquoise wire scorched black as a tire
They didn’t think twice, just let bullets fly
For justice, for sovereignty, for all but equality
Making it safer for you and I
Skin shades darker was his bulls eye, his marker
To aim and shoot (don’t question the lie)
For theft he’d not committed, his soul was evicted
Though all eyes could see something’s awry
Ain’t done no wrong, sang the just man’s song
Marked the worst of kinds in the worst of times
.
Today I sat silent as a bus was washed vibrant
With a thick, murky, scarlet-red stream
The paint to Satan’s brush on a canvas in this bus
As she sits, knits, and whistles a tune
Two men, faces like jackals, drew knives and let loose a cackle
Twelve others played dead as she heaved a scream
The men asked for her cash, blade dying to lash
She sat, all earth watching; gave not a move
Before she said no, before we would know
The knife took her life and blood shone its gleam
The bus braked stunned, the men broke into run
And still we sat, nothing left to prove
.
My lungs became gills as the earth stood still
In air, mist, and impatient fear
What heart we had sank, as our son walked the plank
At last we gave cares delayed by ten years
A shape stood stamped across the moon’s white lamp
Eighty feet into neon haze
He was beaten, ignored, exiled and scorned
Loved by none, crawled through the days
We snapped into shrieks but dared not to speak
He pounced, found peace, and gracefully fell
Pierced the ground, shook all New York with the sound
The crack shuddered through Heaven and Hell
We could have caught him, instead forgot him
That’s no skin off your back
He was just another face, abysmal waste of space
Yet it’s our souls that sins have scorched black

Blog Poetry Blowout, Day 1

2009-11-25T17:56:00.004-05:00

Sacrosanct Prophecy of the First Grader

[Note: I legitimately hate the second stanza]

Dying on a blacktop
Hearing savage laughs and demon girls play
As she stands alone, her shadow a sister as silent as her
Rejected, dejected, wondering when she slipped into Hell
And kicking a stone until it pierces the stars
Jump rope would liberate, yet solitaire starves
A lone wolf chased off by her pack
A lion stolen of all her pride
Her lungs can’t breathe ‘til they laugh again
And a blanket of amity could warm all the world
Yet her shoulders freeze in the August breeze
Her faith vanishes with the cross she flings
Soaring to stab the sardonic sun
‘Till it falls to her feet and the gold snaps in two
And now she knows

Now she knows what no one knows
How the rest can’t compare to the dirt in her tears
How their fun rots their soul and eats them alive
Their laze dooms them, their malice entombs them
For life is too bleak to befriend the weak
Their sins are a trumpet, resounding through all air man breathes
Calling all misfortune and agony to climb off its hooves
To strike those who frolic, lay waste to the careless
And leave those who toil to take up their throne
Fun and success can’t both be, like day and night
And she’d rather fly with the owls than drown in the light
It shan’t be long ‘til she’s hailed as their queen
Once the earth spins to a point where justice can breathe
And the slothful perish, the lonely are crowned lords
And the age of kings shall-

…what’s this?

Their forked tongues turn to her, jump rope in hand
Beckon her over and gesture a wave
…Maybe she’ll give them a chance, just this once
See what it’s like, walk a mile in their hooves
And maybe stick around, if they’re not what she thought

May Blog Poetry Blowout Begin!

2009-11-24T19:33:00.002-05:00

As some of you may have noticed, I've been slacking on my blog updates... a lot. I can't keep up this procrastination much longer, so my plan is to give my endless adoring fans [note sarcasm there] one poem per day for at least the next week and a half, until I run out of poetry worthy of the blog. Sorry for being so lazy, check back here if you like what I've posted, and Happy Turkey Day everyone!
-Pete(r)(Reptar)

Rhyming poem written on my iPod on the bus to a cross country meet

2009-09-27T14:19:00.036-04:00

Can you still remember a gray November rain
Did you feel the turning wheel and the ever-nearing pain
Did you raise His praise as you burned in flames
Or hide in haze to die another day

Does your scripture paint the picture that eyes watched all along
Does water blessed to be its best give you strength to carry on
Does your lead bird sing a dead word onto burning page
Or does the dove from above hide its love when encaged

Has your world unfurled to what you once called home
When swords are settled, did your Lord leave you alone
Does your blood still chill at the blood once spilled
Is their kind still blind to their own damned mind

Sandy Eyes, swallow your sighs
In the skies there's no demise
Hear the devils die, they lived a lie
Carve wings from cries and learn to fly

The future shines bright-
(Shines bright as night)

Note: Basically this is an atheist talking to someone who survived a genocide aimed at his own religion, and lived through the end of it. From a religious persepctive I disagree with a lot of what I wrote here besides the last stanza, so keep in mind the poem's narrator is an atheist before you attack me with a torch.