World War 3

[RiverNotch]

I take in bits of this, and struggle with others intensely despite really trying.

I think the sonnet is lovely to read, but I get lost in places.

And before I would comment further, I am interested to know if you actually follow religion with genuine belief?
As overall, applying direct meaning and logic, the writing to me at its strongest suggests you don't. Yet so much of it seems to be written as if you do?
Whilst grabbing meaning here and there, without the answer to this question (which you may not wish to answer) it is confusing to me...

I suppose I do. But I have an....at best interesting, at worst bad-faith, relationship with religion, or at least the church I'm currently a member of (as well as, perhaps, the Church itself), that I never really explore beyond the aesthetic; ultimately, my connection to the God I want is too great a mess of anxiety (of the earthly sort -- I suppose going to a Baptist school removed any anxiety with regards to the afterlife, that being, however synergistic, not really under my control), intellect (in the sense that the church I want to join, I can only at the moment join intellectually, it's much too far away -- as well as the fact that I enjoy using the Faith for writing more than actually practicing it), and contradiction (I suppose here, the best not-really-a-metaphor would be my veneration of the red-haired woman) that I can't really say if tying all those things together, or hidden deep within the center, is something I could call g(G)enuine b(B)elief.

All that said, I don't really know how my actually believing in God (I suppose that's what your question means distilled -- and my answer distilled, though seemingly tangential, is that my relationship with him mirrors that of my relationship with my parents) relates to the piece. But I do sense that the phase I wrote this piece and its sisters in may have been a bit too referential for my own good -- the chief things, I suppose, is that this refers to four poems (that I think the titles and the pieces themselves do a fair, if still over-puzzly, job of revealing), and was written as a response to all the distressing things that happened last November (or rather, my incapacity to respond to them). Thanks for responding to the piece and getting through this convoluted reply!