Brian Dykstra

Actor Writer HBO Def Poet

Education an arresting new play by Brian Dykstra

Education is a thought-provoking new play about two young people who fight for their right to express themselves in a society hostile to any change in the status quo. Set in Ohio, the play begins with a high school senior’s attempt to burn a flag for a school art fair and becomes a story about squelching speech and the obstacles we set in the way of young people who might have the talent to become artists.

The Atheist’s Love Poem

by Brian Dykstra

I love you evolutionary. 

I love you evolved. 

I love you with a living, breathing reality that was and continues to be paramount in keeping the species in existence. 

I love you with a love that evolved so that people would bond, so that families might fight and die for each other so the entirety of humankind could not only continue, but be possible. 

I love you with what makes us possible

With A Love that saves not only lives, but our species. 

I love you with the echo of history and with a love that is better today than it was a 50,000 years ago, 100,000 years ago because it grew and improved and got better, because it is the nature of evolution to make modifications that strengthen and toughen and work. 

It works. 

It works better because it evolved. 

It is not some spiritual creation that is given to us. It doesn't happen to us. It has grown in us, we've grown it, to make our lives better, to make each other better. 

I love you because loving you my life is better. 

No, that's too shallow, better even than that, it makes my life possible. 

I love you because loving you our life is possible.

Not because it was prescribed by a deity, but because it was forged in our history, in our DNA, in what it is that makes us human. 

I love you better than any religious magic that was bestowed by a loving, caring god, creating us in his image. 

I love you from the march of pre-history handed down throughout the ages, carried within the images of people like us, leading back through branches of family trees and evolutionary ladders and refined like brainwaves, like speech, like blood cells, like music, like fingerprints, like spinal fluid. 

I love you evolved. 

I love you evolutionary. 

I love you like only a sentient being can. 

Without god in the way. 

Without voodoo. 

Without some spiritual recipe we prescribe and manufacture and give away to a deity we rely on because we can't take credit for loving each other this much, because for some reason, we keep believing there's no way we're worth it. That's what everybody tells us. We're not worth it. 

Not without some God handing out this otherwise unknowable gift.

Well, fuck that.

I got this gift from my ancestors, and I thank them for it, and it is now mine. 

Like this is my hand. 

And I extend my hand. 

And I offer my love. 

Because it is something to be reckoned with. 

Not something simply to cherish. 

But to combine with yours to use to move mountains. 

Because without it, we never got here. 

We never existed. 

We never evolved.