"Love-Hate Relationship" or "A Soiled Prayer"

When I was seven, God,

I was told to believe

And never be afraid,

For your invisible hand

Would set things right.

But if it didn't

(And here's the dodgy part)

It'd be your infinite wisdom,

After all; and I was clearly unfit,

Too ignorant, like the rest of us,

To comprehend the bigger picture.

My feeble seven-year-old intellect

Stubborn, headstrong, refused to conform

And thus I became an atheist.

Impressed with angst?

Seduced by rebellion?

Swayed by logic? (or lack thereof?)

I cannot say for sure.

For a dozen years or so,

I relished making my parents cringe

And shredding to bits

The arguments of my devout friends.

It wasn't their faith which was to blame,

I assure you, Lord, it was my tongue,

My acid tongue, which true to its name

Spewed forth venomous bile

In the guise of high rhetoric.

But as you know,

At eighteen, one lives a thousand lives

And a thousand times does one die;

Elevating the mundane,

Debunking the profound

At the drop of a hat.

In my thousand-and-first avatar,

I, inebriated, desolate, disjoint,

Declared to the heavens

The following blasphemous words,

"Why do you torture me so?

If you're real, make your presence felt!

I've been pining away in vain,

Not a sign of my beloved yet,

And I've been wasting away for so long...

Surely, surely this is a garden-variety miracle

For a divine old fart such as yourself!"

As it so happened, you obliged

And I was united with my apparition in red.

It was on a lark that I stopped believeing

And on a lark did I believe again.

I know I'm not supposed to summon you

Think of you as a last resort.

In fact, truth be told, your way

Is to renounce desire altogether

Or something like that.

Forgive me, I've been born again

Not too long ago.

But how do you explain

My return to your flock

In the wake of my failures

On the trail of my defeats

And with the stench of insincerity

Still bearing down heavily...

I believe I love you,

Most days when I wake up.

My prayer, however, isn't pure.

And I'm convinced, now,

That every prayer is equally soiled, equally defiled.

There are no holy cows, among

The mad cattle rush of pilgrims,

The frenzied faithful, who now

Call me one of their own.