“Our Prophet fills our lungs with water so they may better love the air.”
– BioShock Infinite
steeped in sweet sweat.
swept in slick sermon.
the song of service
recorded in the hymn book.
see the recently asleep child
stack the books
into a playhouse?
a sanctuary within
a sanctuary while we prayed
for kingdom come,
forgetting how kings
whipped our bones clean.
to what music do we
now cling? our own
songs or the ones
we learned when too young
to know what we didn’t
know? when i stepped from
the church, the sky
was cloudy. i had
to reconstruct the stars
from memory. but
i remembered the position
of not a single one,
not even the bright
north, neither either
gourd’s reaching handle.
so i sat in my car
and went nowhere.
turned on the a/c to
feel the presence
of the chilled fake wind.
sweat and skin cooling.
with my phone dead,
no gps. we’ve seen
the maps so many times
we forget men made them.
once i touched a cross
and felt something i called
god, though before christ
a cross was just
a torture apparatus. in
a hunger i swore was holy,
i sucked a dead fig, but
having never had a fig
i swore it was good
and sweet, prayed a thanks,
had another.