Doubt

By Christopher Michael

Doubt is my faith.

Doubt is my shield against the pain of a God that kills kids

Doubt turns cyclones that demolish cities into simply cyclones that demolish cities

Rather than unfair judgements from on high or from below

Doubt rips the heart from my certainty opening me to knowing

Then dissolving knowing until actions and decisions are paralysed

Leaving me ignorant of my power

Open to your decisions your actions

To blaming myself because I know I'm passive

Doubt holds me safe from the complexities of love

It pushes me outside myself to look back with anxiety

Pulling apart love's excitement and ordinary intimacies transforming them into techniques

Into hormones, electric pulses in fat lined nerves

Doubt keeps me small inside myself

Watching earthquakes of feelings vibrate inside me but beyond my sense of self

Hiding me from the risks of exposing myself to you

It's protection keeps me from standing up to face a world that might tear me to pieces

Or might feed and hug me just for being here

Doubt blinds me to the little things I do that make you feel it is worth going on

It arises from and teaches me distrust

Distrust of my senses, of my thoughts and feelings, of the history that made us

It leaves me alone in a claustrophobic lifeboat with clawing growling wilderness

Drifting in the flows that bind, connect and free

Civilization a ferment composting communion leaving words and actions

with meanings of mere thoughts whilst being is left lonely in Your absence