Grave plots bought early in a frontier town next to father and father’s father and dog by the remaining gentry who trace descents down, heirs of grandfather’s tools and grandmother’s recipes. Tornado season. Cheap flooring laid by strangers found, Good Christian couples and mysterious transplants. Birds by the creek and the delicacy of insect noise, carved names laid to rest amidst everlasting life besides fields of dominion promised in Genesis; a Jerusalem of granaries and meatpacking plants. Was the worker’s comp. church sponsored? It’s my business to know the fine grain differences between clever demons, surrounded - maybe? - by hardened eyes that spot the subtlety in corn and orchard. I hear ducks now. A lower margin, therapeutic pursuit inherited responsibility does not allow for. Against seasonal inevitability, what can one do except abandon hope, as I did when I entered here? I abandoned hope for everlasting life long ago, I threw it aside, furious I was being disallowed time to cherish my everlasting present moments. I am surely abandoned as I have abandoned all except my blessings.
When the roof was broken and there was nothing I could do in the moment except extend my hands in gratitude, I was given water. It cascaded over beams sure to rot and soaked into floors promised to fall in. I bought my tears with a timed exit and my baptismal font is from Home Depot.
Give me the McDouble of clothing. I’m trying to run a temple here, one that has no need of blocks of marble sold on a commodity basis. I passed through the eye of the needle because I was spiritually impoverished. I shall feed the five thousand for an effective markup, and build Babylon in Providence’s green and pleasant land.
I shall not pretend or substitute myself into the past, nor presume to study a patchwork history and scraps. I simply found my rest in a freestanding behemoth wrought by people who wrote crossways by candlelight, wholly untouched by unreached worlds.
What has been sent through a hundred and twenty years? A belltower built when a watch was an expense, stained glass painted as necessary custom. The fullness of an empty church at midnight, a sanctum with its own wordless certainty. A chart of joys and sorrows, beloved and neglected: Nathless he so endured, margin used to full extent to hold on for dear life to what is holy.
I offer a church that graces silence with presence, a teacher that yearns to be met. Bricks do not care for tears, they are perfectly indifferent, and so I’m throwing my arms around Paris; I ride a landlocked Venice on a Japanese Piaggio. I offer all my witchcraft and well-learned politics; I offer myself a stranger for whom nothing is written who knows that for what is given, nothing is written. I take what offers itself to be used, an accumulated concern that bears the impress of all who handled it, and expend margin still.
A dollar was still a dollar, and they bought a good piano Tattered and worn, yet present. Sentimentalism is a curse, and shrewdness is only a virtue in service of something more ineffable; Forebears known through their faith in a prosperous toil One day I, too, will be part of what remains.
As for me, I’m okay flat, but I will bounce back spun out, but spinning alone aboard a space station, yet grounded broke, but with unimaginable wealth given to despair, yet given something I could have never reckoned; and becoming a leader with no followers a shaman without ghosts a gangster with no minions an artist without patrons, only customers a patient patient a poodle who hasn’t worked out how to hunt or play, a plodding poodle can’t I be a prancing poodle? or just; the perfect poodle that keeps on top of things, that balances spinning plates on sticks on her snout, that revolves with silent grace like Kubrick’s platforms; that backflips through flaming hoops, yet remains casual and composed, artful and delicate, strong and serene; displaying all the virtues listed by the virtuous with the mastery of a Machiavellian, being whatever is needed and providing whatever is wanted living a splash of a life Hockney’s pool and Mishima’s poetry pink champagne and gas station beer the poodle does everything seen on TV and offers everything promised by Akenaten’s dupes she has gold earrings and wrenches made of American steel and knows secrets are a poor substitute for unpredictability:
I fell down a hole digging for treasure and now I have to dig my way out, I saw a pot of gold at the end of a rainbow and rode it here. I don’t know if I will ever know or become myself but I am here to be known through what matters.