Strung out prayer, mine among the death-obsessed Millerites, and the firepillaring sermons of the old blackbacked baptist upon his treestump altar, yea, yea, yea, hollow out the inn of the soul, all awash in Valentinian light. Take view of the trials and sorrows of this disappointing human life and behold the wombing misery of man! And where, oh where upon Vermont’s green-capped peaks or Ol’ Jedediah’s fogging forests, oh where will He first come?
The court is awoken
by the sound of birds,
a chorus cheering the prince
as he slits the throat of a lion.
Bells in the square.
You know the court by its beasts,
their talons and beaks.
Swallows,
sparrows and others birds,
the turn of the circle
fresh in the air.
Heck Texas is vile. The kind of book you must hide under your mattress if you’re having company over. For the (all too justifiable) fear that anyone who chances to stumble on this text and is dispossessed enough to open its cursed pages will forever pass judgment upon you and yours. Banishment from the church group vacation up to the mountains for inadvertently summoning demons of pain and trauma and inflicting their wrath on all of those in your immediate proximity.
Yeah, well, I’m back in Brazil again. At night in Rio, I dare-you-ly walk with my headphones in, turn it up and see how loud I can drown myself in and still hear the crashes of waves. I waited forty-five minutes in line at the grocery store on a wednesday at noon to buy a liter of filtered water. The beach tempts incessantly from my patio, where I smoke kumbaya and pretend to think,
