All my friends are learning to shapeshift
into God. One opens
his body into a collection of beads. The other
burns out himself with
incense and fish oil. Every attempt is a new
way to worship something
different. Say, a redwood nailed to the East.
Say, waterbirds
swallowing half the fishes in the sea. Most of
the people I know are cone-shaped.
Always protruding. Always piercing into
everything that
doesn’t smell like God. In one story, there is
a man collecting
milk teeth from another’s lungs. In the same
story, he poisons
an oxygen that isn’t his. They say there is no
difference between murder
and suicide. I tell them it all depends on what
was killed.
My friends are finding it hard to stay alive.
Firmament is the root word for sunrise.
But even at that, there is no need to let too
much darkness into our night.
