Your eyes walk in file towards an open door that's spilled with light over the carpet
and hidden with the vines and leaves, because memory does that, adds color and excusable
human absurdity,
and inside the door is the heavy iron box
with your nowhere blanket,
your book filled with blood,
your pulsing blue hearts
and sun-dress,
the magic medallions, speech bubbles,
coins and ribbons,
the collection of bright yellow clouds.
None are real anymore, of course.
They scratched off and became the soil under the tree, when you were hiding your face
through the branch, seeing people with smiles too heavy for their spines, and their pink
skulls shaking with the wind, and the vibrations of the earth making you tremble but also
keeping you warm in the midst of all those laughing bones, as your heart proved too light
for your clothes.
Then the air catches to the color and pulls and mashes it the way memory can.
People smile at you knowingly.
They're in the poorly lit photos: the girls, the boys -- in the background or like ornaments
while everyone else is nailed to words or furniture. The sky is huge above them like a slab
of cheerful blue cement.
You think about how it all happened, and about what exactly will happen now.
You think:
mama, papa,
everyone is dead, or dying.
Jesus made the earth in seven heartbeats
out of science and his own pale love.
Would stand beneath the sky perfectly still thinking nothing
until the moon became a solid silver mass above him
and the stars shook with deep flourescent electricity.
This new sky would follow him like a ghost as he walked,
would saunter down to wrap itself around his body as he slept.
He would dream of being immersed in cold water,
looking up and seeing sunlight gather and divide in a war of currents.
Jesus bared his soul to the whore,
kissed her on the lips and taught her arithmatic,
told her stories of the priests on the hill,
the kingdom of heaven and the music of the spheres.
Then she told her own stories, of the ocean and it's cities,
of the lights and forms that blink in the towers.
At night as she slept Jesus would peek beneath her skin
and count the points of light within her body, floating
and glistening on a smooth, brilliant, night-colored liquid,
a sea so deep and silent, like music.
Jesus picked molecules from the grass and trees,
watched them spin around his finger and showed his apostles.
'Blessed are the meek,' he would say, with this
little atom of nothing tracing the curve of his fingertip.
But once he ate the fruits of a shaman and vanished into thin air,
saw a desert cave with a convulsing red tongue,
and bearded holy men sprouting like mushrooms out of camel dung.
He hid in a closet, convinced he was stalked by an olive grove,
chased by the devil and the goverment,
and knife-like birds that would cut him.
He could see nothing but but the blood behind his eyes.
Then one time, drunk on whiskey in the desert,
Jesus dug into the sand not sure what he would find.
He found a small deposit of smooth black stones
warm from the heat. He looked at them, heavy in his palm,
but they hatched into a glitter of tiny black birds,
that flew away in a dark cloud towards the ocean
before he could say a word to them.
He went home and asked his mother what they meant,
sat quietly on his bed sheened with sweat, and nervous.
Ten days later, while on the cross,
Jesus inexplicably recalled his first memory.
He was carrying the bucket of water and standing
face to face with the sun, an immense star like a glowing castle,
a pile of light that reached into everything.
This raw end heat filled him with colliding particles and steam,
with tiny movements and a buzzing pressure behind his eyes.
On the cross, torrents of blood flowed from his wounds
bathing the dirt beneath him.
As his body floated above Golgotha,
Jesus tried to stretch his body to fill all of eternity
in a futile attempt to catch up with his soul.
He said goodbye to his himself and his family,
and not knowing what else he might do
he counted to 10 and fell asleep.
Jesus dreamed of nothing in particular,
and was silent.
