A Private Faith
Poems read at Annie Bloom's Books during a feature alongside Stephanie Strange and RJ Equality, on March 24 2026.
NOTE: UNTIL AFTER THE PERFORMANCE, THIS TEXT IS IN DRAFT.
1
Call me Tau. My gods grant names based on where we are sent, so here I am upon Earth, the magnificent paradise – Terra Augustus Utopia!
I practice a private faith. I am called to worship by forces as real as the sun and moon, but we don't proselytize. We send and we summon, but our mysteries can only be found, never answered. You might think Harry Potter depicts an adorable wizard school, but colonizers like Rowling destroyed everywhere my kind might have found common ground. Except, not everywhere, because we are everywhere. You can't kill what's embedded in the possibility of choice. My faith doesn't proselytize. It just returns.
I don't invite you to worship my gods. I don't invite you to understand my magic. I invite you to stand at the threshold and bear witness to forces you will never comprehend.
Listen, mortals, and fail to grasp:
The Only True Form Of Death
Though I slew the Buddha in the street,
His disciples assure me he can take the heat
Because immortals like us call samsara home
And time beyond time, the cycle becomes known.
They say to be human puts you close to nirvana
But will you know what I mean when I say karma?
Not the tendency of my morality to return to me,
But the velocity that sends you round the wheel,
The tilt of your keel, the taste of your soul's steel.
The moral momentum that is your mind's only meal.
As suffering and attachment stoke your hunger
Will you resist the pull to fall under
The spells of depression, the illusions of despair --
Despite their venom, will you escape their lair?
Or will you delve the dungeon, adventurer?
Will you seek loot and booty, conquistador?
Come and find me, settler. Come and see.
Come below and meet Cipactli,
The maw of maws and countless claws!
The deathless depthless tasteless hunger
That you may already worship, in error.
The greed to get all you can't take with you,
The brutality to beat what won't bow to you,
The lust you can't trust not to leave you,
So you eat it, and it devours you.
Is that the human nature that neighbors nirvana?
Or will I agree with the coyote who says I oughta
Rediscover the clever to weather stormy weather
Because a hard rain's gonna fall on frail thatch
If I don't find my community an escape hatch?
Of course, there's no escape from samsara
Except nirvana
And immortal karma never becomes a bodhisattva.
We go round and round those timeless grounds,
Because desire might be suffering so profound
But tell a witch the truth so I know your measure:
Have you never felt pain that felt like pleasure?
Why would I want it to
Stop?
2
My faith is not organized. We build no temples, gather no congregations, nor even know each other by name. I know my peers by smell, but that's because I was raised by dogs. We do not all worship the same gods, because the fae outsiders that English can only crudely describe as such, do not all get along. Even my own pantheon has put aside its differences and united in me only to observe:
The Fate of Monsters
I'm worried about you, humans. Do you want to go extinct? You sure act like it.
I think some of you want to watch it happen. The seas might boil in your lifetime, mortal, because you couldn't stop the death cult of capital and colony. You still can, there's still time -- but how much?
I don't know that you grasp the significance of the changes your hubris summons. It won't just be uncomfortably hot or cold or strange. You won't make a home in bunkers or vaults like your adorable stories depict, to wait it out, to inherit the ruins of a world that yearns for your return. Gaia won't wait for you. She will shrug you off and move on, with no more care than to shift in one's sleep. Like all species, you exist in a narrow band of ecological possibility, a puny sliver of tolerable conditions in temperature and atmospheric composition. If the oxygen content of the air you breathe rises or falls too much, the patience of bunkers won't save you. The Earth will have no place for you, and no cleverness will make one.
If Gaia does allow you a niche, if the extinctions you summon do not altogether swallow you, then some wretched few who have forgotten everything and who trust no one, who are sick and ill-suited and stubbornly alive -- they will be the offering to evolution's grace. If it takes mercy on you, it will take its penance. It will take your fingers and your toes and your frontal cortex. It will reshape your eyes and your tongues and your dreams. It will take civilization from you because it so clearly posed a threat to your survival. Your naked skin will become a crushing flaw in weather no longer meant for you; your grey matter, the very depth of your thoughts, a liability shorn like wool, braided into the layers of the soil of the eons, and you, none the wiser -- not any more.
You won't miss the world that was, because the world that will be, will be all you've ever known. You'll eat insects and be thankful for every calorie. You'll shiver in the winter and be grateful to wake up. You'll scour the microbial scum that grows on plastiglomerate stones, gnawing at the detritus of your Ozymandian ancestors, and make a paste of them that qualifies as nutritious.
Perhaps you will return to the trees, the ones that remain, and become quick-moving sloths that birds and lizards have nightmares about. You'll swing like a primate more savage than any other, because the lesson your body will learn is not that cooperation triumphs. If you'd cooperated, this wouldn't have happened. No, you'll learn that brutality is always the answer. You'll bite what struggles until it bleeds and struggles no more. You'll descend from the covenant of profit and privation, back to that of prey and predator, where the bears and tigers of the new world will consider you their delectable lessers.
Maybe you'll take refuge in caves again, deeper than any ancestor before you. When your bunkers fail you, maybe those frail bodies that spill out of them will find their way in the dark down deep below. You won't need eyes there, not like you have. They will become white and empty, and your ears and nose sharper than ever. Your digits will turn stubby for digging, or long for climbing. Slick surfaces that generations of fingers slowly wear away will one day feel the touch of fingers grown for them. You won't think anything of it because it'll be all you have ever known.
If you want to keep what you love about being human, you'll have to use it wisely. You can transcend the covenant of predator and prey with a few fancy tools and institutions, but that doesn't get you out of your pact with evolution itself. If you live at all, it's because you keep a niche. If you lose it, you're done. No descendants. That's what it means to be part of a genetic legacy, mortal. As for me, I'll return regardless. I'll be one of those birds and lizards that has nightmares about you, and every time you catch me and bite my head off, my last thought will be to wonder: why would Creation contain a monster like you? Unlike you, immortals can't learn. I'll never understand why you do this to each other, but I'll keep coming back to try and figure it out. I hope the calories of my corpse grant you the time you need to change your mind.
Unless, you really do want to watch it happen. Then buckle up, my dear voyeur. The fate of monsters will be quite the show.
3
You might wonder how you can get your own magic. You might wonder how exactly one becomes a mage. The truth is, I won't tell you. Either you'll be stupid enough to find out the hard way, or you'll be lucky enough that strangeness never comes unbidden.
The last of my patrons to show itself has an earthly name: the Hungering Oak. How fitting, in the wooded wealth of my native Cascadia, that a fear-eater would make an acolyte of a scared child. Unlike the maw-of-maws, the Oak doesn't just hunger. It plans, and plows, and plants, and harvests. It has refined tastes when it comes to terror. As an acolyte, it is my nature to intimidate, but as a heterotroph, I must consume life, not fear. When I scare you, it doesn't sate me. Your cowardice satisfies a more celestial creature.
Let me curse with knowledge of a spell called:
Nails in my Trunk
Find me in the forest under the full moon.
Come alone when you barter for another's doom.
My branches smell your iron crown;
My leaves watch you as you approach my mound.
Place the nails against my trunk, and thunk
Thunk, thunk, hammer til the curse is sunk
Into my flesh, along all the other notes of death
Who scorned lovers and lost mothers have left.
The sacred papers flutter in a sudden breeze
And you wonder if a being like me can breathe.
My edges dance in your lantern's light,
And though you consider flight, you steel your might
And remain
To finish the work for which you came.
Or, is my bark to blame
For stifling your good sense
As you look back over the distant fence
At a town whose glow and glower
You have wished I will devour?
The social function of any curse is release,
So you return to bed before dawn in relief
That my power is a myth and not a door
Though your offering does sink into my core.
By day, my trunk boasts only brown once more.
Surely I won't really realize vengeance
Because trees don't ask for penance.
We abide, until you cut us down.
I can take your nails for generations on end.
You'll die in peace, because I don't want revenge.
I savor the terror oozing from the wounds time won't mend.
I don't need to scare you to feast on what's been sewn.
You did that all on your own.
4
Descartes supposed a duality separating the mind and body, but in reality it's more of an odd couple situation. The unity that you call you is the meeting of the mind and body, but your mind isn't your brain. The brain is a part of the body. The mind remains a mystery to empirical material science. What physical processes does it comprise? Does it even exist? If consciousness is not physical, then where does it come from?
Have you ever met a sleep paralysis demon? You awaken from a shallow slumber to find a stranger looming, and the only relief from being locked in your skin arrives when you muster enough dread to scream. Will you believe me when I tell you who that demon is?
It's you. It is:
The Spirit Returning
I crawl back to you from eternity
Because you have the audacity
To once more summon me.
I wriggle and writhe toward flesh
Toward embodiment and death.
I shape my self to the shape of you.
The grim outsider stumbling, you rue
To recognize as humanoid, a void
Of absence and wrongness;
Limbs too many, eyes too few, witness:
I crawl back to you from eternity
Bonded from birth to death, you see
Because you summoned me.
The monster shuddering toward you
Inspires such horror and dread you
Seize up, freeze up, paralyzed, you
Find your muscles immobile and gripped
As vapor-like I slip through your lips.
As I seat myself in your mind at dawn,
I begin to taste the terror you have drawn,
The nightmare you consider me to be
Though you had the audacity to summon me.
Embodied again, I feel myself screaming,
So by closing my mouth upon waking
I halt your riot and render you silent.
If you have learned anything from me tonight, let it not be that magic is real. Let it not be that the gods are listening. Let it not be that their names could possibly fit in your mouth. Remember, instead, that you do not need answers. You can live with your questions. You can sleep soundly and laugh with who you love, and the heavens that hear you do not ask for acknowledgement. You can die in peace however you like, and whatever happens after, happens. As best you can, strive. Live your every good dream.
We can take care of the rest.
