walls, loss of light

            “Other seed fell among the thorns, and the thorns came up
             and choked it, and it yielded no crop”. – Matthew 13:7


Blame the self, blame you – few do both.


You are the room I flee with the door flying shut behind me. If I come back, it is from exhaustion, not regret.


Inevitable how my mother lost me in the middle of a sentence about a happy life, amidst ‘marriage’ and ‘the christian faith’.


Beware the taxi-driver with his colour-printed pamphlets about God and The Way. Two miracles, he claimed, in a life without miracles, when luck visits the unlucky at any time, and eventually.


Beware the evangelist whose mind is buried like a bookmark between the pages.


The mind must be an interminable rush of clouds, the occasional good weather.


Walls are you. Any loss of light is also you.


Takes time to accept this is how I find you. Only this or inside a house on fire do you regain my full attention.

Nothing stopped Mother Teresa, not a broken collarbone, not two heart attacks.


Isn’t it like you to prefer the gift not given with great emotion, but with great discomfort – the act of kindness no kindness to us.


Happy the atheist that buys the poor man a meal, no thought of your kingdom in her head.


Let's return to that chair, the dark room encircling it like a suspicious dog, your whip drawing my body to its reaches , followed by a slow, nearly tender settling of the self, that moment when the body rediscovers sensation – so this is why I let you do this, this is why you did not heed my cry and stop...


Let’s talk about endings. Some I ask for, some you inflict upon me. (Not some. Most.)


You arrived stomping upon the void’s wide roof, proclaiming ownership, spinning out the world on the loom of your laws, laws you had in you all along without question.


When did you first perceive the need for your pale shadows, children born thirsty for your light?


Is the cliché then true, that the point of conflict was to charge the light with meaning – not just hope, but also reward?

Or is the mystery not a mystery after all, that you arrived without reason, like a seed with its singular purpose – purest want – needing us to fail and keep failing in the light of your original success?


I kneel to respect you, the you in the altar, the sculptural cross, the you that hangs in the air for as long as incense can hold a church in its atmosphere.


The stories contradict not just each other (Jesus healed two blind men after Jericho, according to Matthew; Mark claims it was only one), but also themselves (“Not be judge, lest you be judged”, as opposed to  “…judge the twelve tribes of Israel”,  in Matthew’s account).


I enter your house, a spy committing the sign with a finger kissed by water.


Already, altar boys send a frisson down a thigh; clenched eyes upon the brink of something spiritual, my head bobbing under the cloak (“hard and rough” as Simone Weil described of the test for what is real).


My throat is lined with weeds. If it sounds like I am choking, you are wrong.


I am back in a room that has given up its light. The chair is you. And I am also you. At last, I admit this.


This also means you are a fool and full of holes.


Admit this is not going anywhere. Admit you never meant for any of us to triumph.