21. Run.

She sits cross-legged in the middle of the floor, soldering components to a breadboard. A thin line of smoke rises, but it’s not enough to trouble the smoke detector, assuming the room has one. The air conditioning’s busted. She pushes up the red and white bandanna that’s holding her hair out of her face and rolls a Budweiser across her forehead. He lies on the bed and watches.

It’s an emergency beacon, crammed into the husk of a Panasonic cassette player. Once it’s finished, she’ll flip the switches duct-taped on the side and press the play button. Every now and then she turns it on and watches numbers scroll across the screen ripped from a Casio digital watch, scowls, turns it off again.

When she gets it right, it will signal the mothership. If there’s a mothership. She thinks there’s a mothership, but the smile she gives him, trembling slightly at the corners, shows she’s not completely sure.

“What was it like?” he asks. “In the facility?”

She doesn’t say anything for a long time.

“Cold,” she says…

20. Dog.

There is a big dirty old dog whom has been laying outside for weeks now. We pass him by each day on our walk to the corner shop. Birds and cats like to crawl upon him, he will yawn at the very most. Some days we’ll leave water or a small meager treat, but mostly we simply wonder what he’s up to?

Yesterday he licked our hand, my heart and I. Our spine signaled mixed salutations.

Today he was gone.

19. You Would Laugh to Look Upon Her.

She comes in every morning with the same old inquiries. They don’t have garlic ropes at the Northgate supermarket, so she is forced to improvise. She adds a fresh steak to her basket, lays it gingerly beside the white bulbs. Every time she grows anxious she immediately replaces her fear with 10 Hail Mary’s and one Our Father.

She doesn’t travel without her silver cross and checks peoples reflections through her compact mirror before truly trusting them. I’m serious, she does this. It is rumored that she only drinks Holy water which they will say she swears replenishes itself in her WWII military-issue canteen.

In her idling car she sits for a moment packing cloves into each of her pockets and adding one ore two like new-age charms of garlic affixed to the long white-gold box-chain that is always around her neck. There is a small porcelain icon of The Blessed Virgin permanently stuck to her cars dash. She has somehow commit The Greatest Salesmen in The World to memory, despite the fact that she doesn’t remember having read it, and what’s more: she barely has any conscious memory at all. I know this because when she leaves the bathroom there is sure to be a fresh quote lipsticked into the steel swinging door, mirror or window pane. Greet Each Day With Love In Your Heart… Persist Until You Succeed… Master Your Emotions… There is Power in Laughter… Multiply Your Value Every Day… All is Worthless Without Action… today it was: Pray to God for guidance.

She doesn’t carry the book.

Sandra gets lost almost every time she tries to make her way back to her car.

You wouldn’t believe me if I told you, but her lack of memory is one of her greatest gifts. Her lack of memory keeps her history illuminated. It keeps currents of jokes rolling off her soft pink tongue. It keeps them spilling down the smiling face and bodices of the silk-screened Virgins on all of her soft-cotton tee’s. Her ability to conquer her fear with prayers keeps her smiles genuine and sincere.

When asked what she’s up to, her answer is concise, simple and predictable: believing.

She is truly lucky that she is young, domestically capable and attractive–it completely compensates for her many, many, many social disabilities. I know this because over the years she’s been coming here I’ve noted that when Sandra makes friends, they are hers without end.

She is ridiculous.

18. Might Belovedeath.

Here by sea-washed sunset gates I stand, a woman with a torch, whose flame is the imprisoned lightning, and whose secret name is likened to child, mother of exiles and scorned. From my beaconing hands glow World Wide Welcoming–mild eyes demand this air-bridged harbor that we kindred frame: “To keep, ancient hands, your storied pomp and games!” Prying through these silent lips to sing: “Give to me your vicious cruel rage, your poor untimely crassness, make of me yours huddled in penitent mass, palms softly touch in yearning to breathe free, from the wretched refute of graceless iniquity. Take me homeless, tempest-tost to thee, I lift my sacred lamp before thy goldin door!

As you have brought me to this, at least twice before.”

17. Chastity.

Wants a belt. With a lock. And her very own key.

16. He Needs to be Stronger Than You.

Miranda and I always had a tough time with our own generation. Over wine, in the cool sand stretching back from the dark and stormy midnight sea, we talked love.

“When he can conquer you, that’s when you’ll know. That is tough to find for girls like you and I. We are a dying breed.”

She was right. And I was grateful not to be the only one, and for once to have someone else make sense of something for me.

15. Father Bear, Have Mercy on Her Soul.

Goldilocks licks her finger tips.
The Beds: undone.
The Bears: away.

She found their sacred honey pot,
Accident all over her petticoat and lap.

She is doomed, clearly.

14. Jesus. Christ.

For a very long time now I have had qualms with what I am if I must come to terms with religion… I generally cop-out and say that I’m Spiritual. That I have God, but no religion. If Christians probe further I admit that I believe Jesus existed. I believe humanity capable of his cruel, cruel, death, and, for as long as I can remember–the guilt for his death has weighed upon me.

As a child I was told that Jesus died for my sins, and that singular truth always made a deep and painful sense to me. I am aware that my skin and everything inside of me can go one of two ways. I know that the darkest place a person, and beyond the person: a culture, can go: was to torture, hang and display for a moment frozen forevermore in all of our minds. We have all seen the cross.

I have issues with The Bible, but value it equally among the books in my book wall… In fact, its parables are surpass to most.

I wasn’t raised in one church. I was Baptized Catholic, sent through various Christian rebirths… my exes grandfather is an Episcopal Minister. I have visited many places of worship. None felt like home, none felt genuine and in lack of pretension–two things I need to thrive.

Once, a dear friend roped me into a Harvest Crusade: the New Age Christ rock movement touring the nations ballparks annually. Jesus Christ Superstar on Redbull gives you wings. I swear. We’ll call her Andy. Andy and her family got me there, then tried to force me onto the Angels Stadium baseball field to be saved in the loud, tense arena. This was one of few times in my life that I physically broke down into tears and simultaneously ran away from something. I wont bore you to tears trying to figure out why, either.

I research things that I want to understand. Words like Christ, transubstantiation, transfiguration. I turn to poetry and have in the last few years been repulsed by a great deal of fiction. I research because I like to know what I’m served before I consume of it.

I am placing this here for safe-keeping. For some soul to stumble upon and eat of it and let it swim around inside of him, or her. I guess I’m tired of being smacked for thinking differently and the aggression results in a reaction of some creative sort. I leave this here for anybody with a magnet strong enough to find this to hear that faith isn’t wrapped up simply in tithing and pearls, judgement, and ritual.

Ritual is simply finding a way to nurture, feed and protect the source of imagination and constant act of creation and dissemination taking place in all our minds. Ritual can also be used as a system of control. We have to be the watchmen of our eternal soul.

I prove my faith time and again by that conflicting voice which challenges my inner-most self, in arguments and battles every minute of every day, arguments like: which color looks best… fruit loops or fruit bowl… lover or fling?

Faith for me is holding my dreams and the sheer miracle of vision close at night so I know that I am not a hollow shell filled with conflict and loud whispering wind. To know that I am not alone. Faith is the gift of color and light and the good things we have experienced like music and belly laughter all safe and sound in the piggybank of our mind.

God is a nice word for all of that, but nothing to browbeat anyone over if the word doesn’t fit like a glove, there are other words.

I have God because God is an ideal target to meditate my laser-beam hopes and dreams upon. You could take the title, I’d still have my source. The thing to think upon, might be better put into a question: what is yours?

I guess I just feel like saying that God isn’t simply a man in a suit, assigning gold tin-foil stars to his most favoritest pupils. God is creation, energy, animation, magic, the embodiment of everything. God is consumption. Yes, God is here, and boy is God huge.

Cheers.

13. Easy Access.

His is a persistent voice. It never ceases to surprise.  Though, I must say, that if you come and forcefully impose upon untouched ground: one should heed my advice and neglect to inscribe easy access in a token ring, or on any other thing one might like a girl to open up to or be with. After all we’ve put each other through, it was tactless and classless. I don’t like these games. I don’t want riddles that dance in circles around this place. This world is big enough for two so why travel so far to remind me how little you think of me. Why wrap it in a promise?

Why bother with me at all?

12. To be Triumphant.

It doesn’t make me so sick anymore
The wafting stench of War, Despair, Depravity
Death does not turn my stomach, to eat
A cutlet of tender meat, to touch
Upon a soft patch of animal
Fur–feels soft, smells like dry, sober, animal caress,
Before the farmer comes in casting his looming
Shadow through the clean dust speckled barn light
Sandalwood, sawdust, a sampling of clean moss
I’m not afraid to touch it anymore
I can adjust, like eyes coming inside from the bright lights
I’m not afraid to touch this anymore… It’s here

The rabbit is dead, the children lick her bones
Clean, well, fed, and her fabric sits, one pelt upon the rest
A barrel full of hides, laughter wells up from inside, to seek
Shelter from the cold which waits, lingers, crawls through
Cracks, from beyond this wall, outside it is
Taboo–to wrap oneself in fur, with hungry ones crouched out
Cast in the naked rays of scorching sun, dancing sole-less
Across the dense ice Tundra…
Taboo… am I to climb inside
To take the faded black and white photograph and rip her in two
Half of me
Half of you
Framed
In this simple shaft of light which peers
Inside this bin I’m in
Bottoms
Heads
Flipped and
Tossed
I’ll bet
I care too–deeply
And burrow further–even
Your thoughts
Your mind
I love
The children, plants
Pets

You aren’t allowed to lose
Your mind
Or kill
Your heart

Drive me wild
But never crazy
You aren’t allowed to hurt
Me anymore

I’ve somewhere special to be
And it’s you who is driving me
So happy
It hurts… to see what you’ve made me.