we shaved white hairs
off our god

he was sleeping

the world is vast
is one of many worlds

in his dreams
the blade against skin
his eyes REMing back and forth
like planets or
galaxies lolling in space

his beard fell away like a waterfall
soft as helium

his razed eyebrows
rivers flowing
spilt milk

the hairs of his arms
salt tossed out to where
space is most slippery

but we had the blade
and when he woke up
he was wrathful as always
but light as a gazelle
his thin shorn legs
wobbling across eternity

time for prayer
I said
and we got in our cars

Herman Melville
Michael Jordan
Deepak Chopra
sorry
wrong stanza

prayer should be
un-dimensional
neither matter nor energy
yet not daytime TV

a mushroom cloud of pure grammar
the slow pulse of each word
the universe expanding/contracting again
another big bang
and time is sent skittering
a bunch of molecules
with little to do

we were trying to create
a god light as prayer
flightless as thought
bone-radiant as any gazelle

our cars screeching toward
unshaven stars
even flat-rate parking was beyond
our means

but we’ve been stuck with
this blade
and a welterweight pre-adolescent god
asking us to play chicken
with our prayers

in a billion years
white hairs
re-emerge from the follicles of bright light

once again
that fearsome
homey look
on spacetime