#28 bus

I roll out of my bed with the warmth of my sons tiny hand radiating from my aching back all the to his wide open heart.
I grab my work bag and throw two bus tokens in my pocket.
The walk, it's not too long, but I try to hold my breath as the fumes rising from the street threaten to bleach my lungs and invite my inevitable fight with cancer to take a few steps closer.

I get on bus 28 even as my legs ache to trace a retreat back home to my son, but I travel on.
The ride to where I'm going is only slightly longer than the speech echoing in my head phones by a man blown away from this plane to the next for daring to suggest that we all get along.
His mother felt that bullet through her own heart too, and a part of her followed his soul home.
The part that survived had the name of God on its lips and it was Martin.

It seems that the definition of God is the problen, its pursuit has taken more lives than it has saved.
A name.
That's it.
As the bust shifts, so does the man next me.
His body so heavy with exhaustion that my bones ache with sympathy.
He calls his little girls before they're off to school and his crisp scrubs and scarred badge sway, promising a day cleaning up blood and bed pans.
He's doing the best he can for his children.
To them, his name is God.
He can fix anything.
He protects.
He provides.
He teaches.
He sacrifices...not from a lofty cloud, but with his feet on the cold hard groud of a cruel world, for his little girls.

God lives in the things we can't explain or name.
God does not need a specific look or gender.
What if God simply fills the spaces in the DNA that tells a childs brain to tell a childs heart it's ok to love their "non-biologocal mom".
The woman craved the baby with an intensity that killed her over and over again every day, because she owned a body that couldn't deliver.
If God must have a face, let it be hers. Or the childs or the letters that connect to each other on the genetic spiral. The proteins in between other proteins that flourish when they meet their puzzle pieces. The replication of miracles that create bigger miracles.
God.

A man sits alone in the back of the bus.
Body shuddering, eyes red with withdrawal.
The only God he has ever seen comes in.
His God is a cruel God, not what you or I would have chosen,
but it's the closest to the man apocryphal text demands exists.
Hypocritical.
Mercurial.
Accepts payment in flesh.
Followers always thinking ahead wasting this life they'll never taste.
Steam rolling anything and anyone to get to that place.

Maybe be God isn't a place. Maybe God is the atoms that make up the pages of the books that divide us, covered up by letters that are attributed to Gods lips but are meant to inspire actions that indoctrinate, radicalize and alienate.
God isn't words, God isn't a face. The 'word' of God is a song not blind faith. Blind because we refuse to open our eyes.  
God is somethinf we can't quite define.
Deep down we all choose Gods face.
It's always been in front of us, even on the 28 bus.