Circus Psalms! Surprising. Painfully so. And your stark lines regarding pervasive cruelty in the service of beauty, your lines regarding the human animal...also painful, and disturbing. I hear your voice vividly in these, and I am further surprised how much your tone—ironic, sarcastic—often reminds me of my own. I suppose that I have sought, of late, to better subdue—at least to disguise—my penchant for sarcasm, but I am pleased that—in these poems, at least—you did not feel similarly compelled. I do wonder, even so, if you have ever also felt chagrin and despair rushing in quickly on the heels of whatever brief and passing pleasures one’s sarcasm provides. In my case, the chagrin and despair arrive as something like a mild nausea. Another irony, perhaps. Perhaps another wave of nausea.
And yes, I too have used my psalms to vent a bit, to call to task the Lord Himself for what can appear to be recurring negligence. The interior negotiation between my faith and glib appearances has obliged my reconstruing what one might mean by such gestures as omnipotence, omnipresence, omniscience, and what it is we ask by praying “Thy will be done.”
Simone Weil now comes to mind. "There is a God. There is no God. Where is the problem? I am quite sure that there is a God in the sense that I am sure my love is no illusion. I am quite sure there is no God in the sense that I am sure there is nothing which resembles what I can conceive when I say that word." She comes to mind, and her fierce eyes hurt me.
Even so, I continue to say these words—to pray these words—of the Πάτερ ημών several times each day; still, I’m all but certain that, ask as one might that His will be done hereabouts, it’s not happening anytime soon, at least not today, not so far.