this is the church you go to if you think God is a strip of pulsing tendon at the center of the galaxy

this is the church you go to if you think God is best worshiped by walking barefoot upon upturned carpet tacks and the Eucharist is a panicked scream in a basement

this is the church you go to if you have identical ones built at ley line intersections across the globe, and at the moment of the eclipse you gather to watch the green light build and aim itself at the sun

this is the church you go to if you were a Cool Lutheran in the seventies and never got over it

this is the church you go to when the scalpel is a blessing, and the only sacrament is the indrawn breath when pain and pleasure confuse themselves with one another

this is the church you go to when God is a great globe of meteoric iron, and you seek to return him to the heavens.

this is the church you go to when the time of Ascension is near; you shall know it by the crop circles and the grey hand clutching your ankle at bedtime

this is the church you go to when God is in the volcano forging a ring of power

this is the church you go to when you're engaged in counterintelligence against Heaven itself

this is the church you go to when you're definitely not bringing fricassee of orphan to the potluck

this is the church you go to when the rhythm to which hymns are sung is the crack of joints as something turns that should not turn.

this is the church you go to when you pray for God not to see you

this is the church you go to when God is the sound made by emptied men moaning on their pillows of stone

this is the church you go to when it is time to be blessed by St. Alia of the Knife.

this is the church you go to when at the end of the service the only sound is the vicar licking clean the empty brainpan.

this is the church you go to when you eagerly await the cleansing.

this is the church you go to when these remain: faith, hope, and charity. But the greatest of these is clinical depression.

this is the church you go to when you want to raise your hands in worship and feel a hot, wet tongue-tip feverishly stroke the salt from your palms.

this is the church you go to when God is a selfish grief that churns in your stomach and burns in your eyes and aches in your fingers and throbs in your head and gobbles up your daydreams like delicacies.

*extremely striking-while-the-iron-is-hot voice* no SoundCloud, but I do have a Patreon with short fiction, art, and a comic about dinosaurs in nuclear winter https://www.patreon.com/jpechacek 

for some reason, some people are reading this as an endorsement of their traditional views.
it is not.
I'm not gonna tell you what to think, but if you are anti-feminist, homophobic, nationalist, capitalist, racist, or prescriptive about church-building, we won't get along.