“If lovelessness is godlessness, will you cast me to the wayside?”
—Moses Sumney, “Doomed”

I don’t know
if lovelessness is godlessness
I feel like lovelessness…for me…
is too much god
is god blessing America
is god and the U.S. government
making lovelessness a quotidian
unquestioned project of mass death

lovelessness is the legislation
is states banning trans health care
is how any critiques of here
become wrong and dangerous
just like critiques of him

lovelessness is states banning books
from lives and libraries and classes
it’s us not having enough time to process
before another law passes
it’s all these decisions to decimate
divided up among the masses

lovelessness is masklessness
it’s not just god-fearing people
it’s everyone not learning from the loss
because back to jobs, joy, and outside
became justifications for genocide

lovelessness is looking forward to forgetting
and that being the whitest type of wanting
ohh I see how all this makes sense then
all of them and god deserve one another

lovelessness is lies about relief
about who we can rely on
god’s taking too damn long
because I really don’t think
he give a shit about Black people
what the fuck is taking him so damn long
again and again

because we don’t have time for divine plans
no tears for targets or police vans
no fears for those fires but I am
finding fault in how scripture and scholarship
can focus on the violence we endure
but not the violence it’ll take
to destroy the imperial core

and yes, all that scares me
but it scares me more thinking about
you and you and you and you
all of us not loved by this empire
it scares me thinking about
how much longer we can survive
despite the lovelessness
and I can only be scared of god
because of his carelessness
when I see all this shit

and I’m not naive looking for a savior
but between him and us
I’m trying to see who has more power
are we willing to be each other’s genesis?
to say, I feel a beginning in you
to say, I’ll have sustained sensitivity
to that feeling and what it could do
like create systems of care and not carnage
as we accept that this work is lifetimes long
but we are a loveliness that we can depend on

my spirit reaches for and is responsible to
the most ungodly love as the most trustworthy
it reaches for the tactics to get to the time
when we end our abandoning of each other
when we do something even god couldn’t do
and then, what are his children gonna say?
what could they possibly do at that point
to define love?

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