Jorge - Flashafter

*

Important to specify the crime -- not one of hands -- the crime was not (just) of hands fumbling with a child's belt. What the men did was worse. The meaning was inside, a hot expanse of pavement in one's inside, boiling, hot enough to fry an egg on - that was the soul, burning scaps of itself - here was the crime scene, but no it still has not been said, the whole thing has not been sufficiently said.

The cracked pavement under a bum in a worn out town. Infrastructure bombed and damaged. What are you trying to say?

The crime lay in the response, that it was a response without freedom now. A child internalizes what happens to it. That is the definition of a child, that porosity. The creature that lets abuse just run off its side into the gutter, that is the adult, the very definition of an adult. Hardened. Horrible, you're already practically in the grave, to be like that. Hardened.

The crime came after the hand and lay in the response. It was the little curled up horrible thing in the midst of abuse that said: there is something enjoyable in that, after all. There is something of me in what happened. As though that was what had been supposed to be.

It was a string on a bass that was not supposed to be plucked, at least not plucked in that cavalier manner. The men plucked it, they broke it, and childhood was over in a hurry -- all in one afternoon. And that was the crime at the root of the crime.

*

Jorge - The Garden of Orthodoxy - Part 3

*

The problem was the way children felt among adults -- so small, so limited, so vulnerable. So much the worm on the ground, to be either stepped on or saved -- or held in suspense, for years and years. It was like the way of the family dog, sitting in the living room. The dog may in some sense think he's human but never imagines he's on the same level as the other humans. The humans have mysterious powers for bad and for good. They can open things, do things. They open the cans of food and shut them again. They have great powers to caress and to hurt.

One needs them and yet wishes they were gone.

The sinister Max would follow the boy around. And he wouldn't go away. He stayed day after day, for a reason. Not even Estelle seemed to know what it was.

On the back porch, there he sat, every part of him far away except his eyes. Those eyes were always placed upon you. They were wet and moist and yet tight as a clamp. And it was not he who went away but Una, one's soulmate. A week away at a distant Y camp.

So make the horrible part go quickly. Tell it at a distance if you can.

The boy went into the garden by himself. The absence of his sister stood by his side. The flowers all seemed dusty and hairy. there was a rotting smell by the pond. Not just the smell of decay but of new growth too. But he didn't want either one.

He looked behind him and the back porch was empty.

Now he went past the edge of the garden, beyond where he and his sister had ever gone. And there was a cabin there or the shell of one.

The three legged dog stood in front of it and barked. A robust deep sound. Go away! Go away!

The protected space had shrunk to a square, a rectangle. At one edge the dog, at one edge the battered and maimed trees. The nymphs fled from the trees like birds, perhaps they were birds.

Behind was his home. In front of him the cabin. A hermit lived there, a young man with a beard, oh crazy one, perhaps the caretaker's son, brain-damaged, squatting on the campus grounds, I guard the creek from terrorists. We used to see him across the field, always smiling. Everything is all right now, everything is good. He stood in the fog wearing nothing. When Jorge turned around to face home he saw his uncle standing in his path blocking it.

No, I am not going to go on. You have to write with a purpose, a purpose that serves, that offers service to someone but who is served? Cast your memory back like a fishing rod but the fish in this creek are dead now. Move on, move on. Something has happened to you, something bad, Estelle said. Why won't you tell me? And Una sat next to you at night in the TV room, with the TV off, she was so careful not to look at you, she waited for you to speak. And waited. And waited. Auntie's health so bad and the fear the fear of -- no not of being orphaned but worse. Someone else as your guardian. Do not say the name, do not even breathe it.

And Jorge lay on his stomach on the bed, fingering the little Canterbury cross that Estelle had given him. It was a cross without a person on it but the locus of a person. If you spoke to it in a sense it spoke back. And Jorge would ask, over and over:

Why didn't you protect me? Why didn't you protect me better?

*

Jorge - The Garden of Orthodoxy - Part 2

*

The caretaker professed to be an atheist, which was a sort of lie or evasion -- no one in the remote land called America was fully able to disbelieve in God, the belief was so to speak in the blood -- not via thinking, it was not a bypath of mentation, rather lay in the sheer act or ambience of whatever harbored thinking, it was impregnated, as all things in that country were and as any Martian would have instantly seen, with the abiding sense of intention underlying everything. Everything possible had first been made possible. There was God (named or sometimes better not) and God underlay everything. So the caretaker was in this sense a bit of a poseur but in any case he called himself an atheist. Enough of that. He was one of those people who would not answer the door. Did not answer the phone. So care was not taken, the garden had no caretaker, and it needed none. It was beautiful without any human touch. But enough of that. The garden thrived on its own.

Jorge remembered the exact day that the Garden of Orthodoxy shut its gate on him -- like a blossom snapping shut at the tap of dusk -- leaving the insects without access or escape and all the happier stories replaced by more somber ones.

Aunt Estelle was in the kitchen rubbing her hands. Una would stare at her and look away. Uncle Max is coming back from his travels, isn't he?

I supose we need to tell the caretaker to get the place ready, Estelle said. But the caretaker wouldn't answer his door.

One day the caretaker's son went off to war. It was either Korea or Vietnam or Iraq, there were so many wars, there was pretty much always a war rustling that far off kingdom. The caretaker received notice by mistake that his son was dead. The authorities had confused 2 recruits. When the caretaker received the news, all of the blood quite visiblly drained from his face and it never returned. You saw a sort of death before your eyes. No God would have done this to me, he said. Then he closed his door. Functions continued but the main thing had been blocked.

Meanwhile the son, the real son, recovered from his injuries, which were sizable, and knit the heart back together. The college paper proclaimed his return. The son came back and knocked on his father's door but the caretaker wouldn't open.

My son is dead, the man cried. I don't know who you are.

Go away!

*

Meanwhile Estelle tried to keep the children out of the way of these adult happenings but she was very distracted because Max had returned. Her husband had a wandering kind of job and a wandering spirit. He was not there when he was there. Una and Jorge hardly knew him, perhaps only had learned from him the strange lesson that male adults were remote, always preoccupied and "far", as though a species not related to -- what? To the heart's affection as it was understood. As though he was not really family. His handsomeness and darkness suggested another way of being. Adulthood for men was something you would grow up into against your will. It was a path out of here.

At the dinner table, in the living room, his eyes followed the boy everywhere and wouldn't let go. How big and strong you have suddenly become.

Now where do you go in that big garden? What do you do all day?

It's just a big place, Jorge said. We just hang out. Nothing interesting.

But I like things that aren't interesting, Uncle said.

Well, when it's hot we submerge ourselves in the trees.

I would like to do that with you, Uncle said. I would enjoy that so.

Away from adult worries.

One feels so free inside nature. Away from society's eyes. One can do whatever one wants. It's nobody's business, just your own assunto. So you can just be yourself, you know?

Then Estelle came in with her hot pad and cloudy casserole, wondering why everyone was so quiet.

Always his eyes followed you. They were like something clinging to your legs and arms, something you tried to brush away but couldn't. One's hair thickened with fear. Responses became complex, and what wasn't painful turned painful simply because it wasn't. This congested state of being was your future. The heart wished to look away, the heart muscle twisted. The loins lingered and looked back. Then the heart really began to beat strangely, so completely off the beat. Why oh why did this man have to be here?

END OF PART 2

*

Useless poems - 10

*

There was a hand in the sun. It was my hand
yet not my hand. It touched me like a hand
and made me warm. Its substance was the sun.
Or else the person of the sun -- because
I felt intention in that hand -- but not
my own because at that time I had none.
I wanted badly not to block the sun
with my ephemeral trauma. To be healed
I knew I had to slow down, had to yield
and do this not in such a willful way
that the sun became only appliqué.
I had to let the outside enter me
with its most inexplicable caress
to unkink and de-stress my deep distress.

*

Jorge: Flashforward

*

And after his innocence was lost -- or exploded as nonexistent -- Jorge would walk the garden of orthodoxy and watch the birds explode too, as if all the leaves had blown away in a sphere of chatter. So the fall surrounded his fall.

They were not birds but nymphs, the lost nymphs of poetry. They blew out of the trees.

They flew in a burst out of the trees, all the nymphs, all the exiled nymphs. They were too delicate to protect.

You bad man! You bad man! they chattered, as Jorge walked under them and all the roving ones stared after him. You have chased us away! the nymphs cried.

Not me, Jorge answered. I want you here. I love to watch you flashing your little skirts and flying over my head. Or hiding in the trees, which are your abode and possession, after all. Every tree to its nymph.

I have not exiled you. But his heart sank as the nymphs deserted their milieu. And the campus developers scouted yet another piece of land, hungry for dorms, hungry for labs, needing something to fill what they saw as empty absent space.

All this was well after Jorge was defiled. The birds left long ago.

*

Thoughts on place

*

A place is enclosed, unlike space. It might be enclosed by sky but still it is closed. Otherwise how could one even be there? All this nonsense of being somewhere virtually -- forget it!

Perhaps this is why poetry of all the arts captures "place" so well. The lovely click-I'm-closed of end rhyme like the border of one's spiritual dwelling, yours precisely because it doesn't contain or even acknowledge all that space beyond that is *not* yours.

I have never seen a "place" captured in a photograph. Never the buzzing balmy edge of things, that gaseous outline that permeates it and permeates you and makes it yours as it binds you to it. Rarely in a painting, never in a photograph -- except maybe in a black and white photo of old architecture? maybe. Also in sepia stuff and old Civil War hallucinations. And Hitchcock's "The Birds" is full of a specific place.

*

Useless poems - 9

*

A beautiful lostness
(near Covent Garden, 10/3/06)

They move from A to B, they move from B
to A -- and then cancel each other out.
Some move too certainly -- they know their way
too well and don't guess what is blocking it.
The blockage is itself an opening.
To see it, feel it, first you must be lost.
It is a queasiness, a presupposed
for knowing where you are, because to know
is pain, this knowledge is a form of pain.

The grid is in the shape of shattered glass,
it slithers in this dance of randomness,
improvisation. In the broken lane
confusion twists like a kaleidoscope
into perfection and comes to a stop.

*

Useless poems - 8

*

Sonnet of the placement of a place
(London 10-1-06)


To understand the placement of a place
is past impossible -- I dream of it
by walking some monotony of bricks
that suddenly have disappeared. The foot
stands on what isn't there and I wake up.
The terror of support withdrawn conveys
in no logical way the preciousness
of having something under one. But what?
What makes the haunting placement of a place?

You might say time consists of pondering
the deep significance of place -- what is
and isn't, in succession. And the way
it now withdraws is very long and deep
to study. And I go there when I sleep.

*

Useless poems - 7

*

"The hunger not to do so"


In the midst of my acting any act
there comes a voice -- like someone in a room
whose echo is offensive, much too loud
to be so inner and perhaps unreal,

a room that is not meditation but
the hunger for it -- hollowing my act,
a voice that clamors for all acts to stop.
It undermines me and will not shut up.

It has this restlessness as if it were
tied down, yet what it wants is not to move
at all -- it wants to lay my will down on
the floor and walk away -- wants this so much

that now it has become the opposite:
it wishes just to sit -- and cannot sit.

*

Useless poems - 6

*

God in the body


The body has its way -- a laying down
like tracks -- of how it can bend, how it can't --
of how, by definition, it can be.
The soul is in denial. If you say
the soul is what the body lets it be
the words don't even form -- they can't be said.
Our words are like a wiping of the slate
on which they're written. Not that they are false.
Their core is sheer evasion. But their sound
is physical. It is the way a slab
of meat would cope with the emergency
(emergence?) of a leak. Some substance leaks
into and through the damage. Someone speaks
a tell me tell me. Who is it that speaks?

*

Useless poems - 5

*

Judgment


I want to take the coat of judgment off
and lay it folded neatly on the ground.
Someday somebody else can put it on,
not me, not me. I want to take it off.
I won't say that it's bad or dangerous,
I won't even say that the time is wrong
for the garment to be worn, and I won't judge
the one who puts it on, if someone does.
I plan to understand much less of it.
I want to think this out a different way.
I want to hear some things I haven't heard.
The right or wrong of what a person does
will be the sound that comes from a locked room.
I heard it but I didn't make the sound.

*

Useless poems - 4

*

The door


The door opened as pain, opened with pain,
was pain -- the tearing open of a wound.
To be inside the room would be to bleed.
You didn't want to pass through what this was
to pass but had no other, easier,
more civilized, more human avenue
to where the knowledge was nor did you know
what it was that you didn't know, just knew
that there was only one way into it.
Pain with the separating feel, the feel
of isolation -- no one else would know
the special grip that it applied to you
nor were you sick enough to want them to:
it was your door, just yours, yours to pass through.

*

Useless poems - 3

*

The path


There are places and there are paths.
Places become internal. Paths must not.
Your path can't be explained but must be there.
No place exists without a path to it.
Depression is your path to joy.
Depression is crammed full of intense meaning
that can't be used, that really has no point
of access, and becomes unbearable.
You must walk it, which means to fathom it.
Its whole reason to be is where it ends,
your place of understanding. You must not
medicate or deny the path you walk.

Your pain is not to push down but to know.
Your understanding is the way you go.

*

Useless poems - 2

*

An inward world


Why was the trip forward so much like
an excavation? How was it that the path
out of oneself chiseled this inward world?
It was like falling into one's own nerve.
Within the pain one did not feel the pain
but was the pain and became what it meant,
and what it meant was quite impersonal,
a sort of unbounded commodity.
It was an awareness that did not belong
to the one who walked its, let us say, its canyons
and salmon-colored shadows, attributes
of a personage well grounded as a place.

God was not lost. God was at home. God was
the owner of this place. God was the place.

*

Useless Poems - 1

*

A horror of being


You had a horror of the sort of being
that was like standing in a light, exposed
to comment --where this comment was defining,
was itself an exposure and was you.
You wished to be not watched, simply to be
without that light of someone else outside
not understanding and not caring to.
And still it wasn't solitude you sought.
You must try to say nothing but the truth.
What you sought was the "someone else" who was
in fact inside and therefore understood
the ground and underpinning of your being
so hard to hold up to the light -- unless
the light was his not just your emptiness.

*

Jorge - the Garden of Orthodoxy - Part 1

*

You were Jorge.

You looked just like Una, your sister, but with a twist that was indefinable and changed everything.

What was balanced in her face became unbalanced in yours.

What made you more than an ordinary man was that you were a worm and not a man.

When other people talked of self-aggrandizement or even self-improvement you would take a breath and scan that very self. Not theirs but yours.

It was moist, it was long and thin, it moved through the earth and disgusted the people who had to look at it. A worm nature.

Offensive to men. Beautiful to God. God felt an absence of repugnance for the worm, God even loved the worm.

Once you had been a human like the others. Una and you were children, living in the Garden of Orthodoxy.

Orthodoxy is not a set of beliefs, Orthodoxy is a place, a world, a realized wing. It is a place beneath the wing of God. One does not "behave well" there. One is close to God there and all behavior is intrinsically "well".

The wing itself shelters you from other kinds of living that you do not really even understand, the kinds of life that lead or unfathomably come to be led astray, de-winged, the flavors of existence that are no longer effectively attached to existence, which in effect shouldn't even be one of the possibles. Because the Garden was in fact everything and everywhere. And so in some sense the Garden still contained even the people who had simply walked away -- who had walked out of the garden one day, as if temporarily, casually, but fully intending to come back.

For Jorge and Una, the Garden of Orthodoxy was a place of sheer poetry, because God was there. They were little children, they took the bliss for granted. The taking for granted was itself the substance of bliss. One moved freely in the shelter of what was not anxious and would never need to be. For the garden thrived in the indifference of time -- not that time was absent or even suspended -- not that time ceased to do whatever it did -- but the concern was a thing that lived miles away, "in the next county", far on the other side of the stiles and hedges and small shimmering animals. There was not the constant bruising reference to time, the looking at one's watch that was said to be the definition of adulthood.

Only protected can one be free.

*

The light was horizontal like the branches of certain trees. How can it be like that? Una asked. Doesn't it come straight down. How are there shadows on these red barks instead of the ground.

I think the light comes oozing out of these dark places, Jorge said. The light comes second, the dark comes first, I think we see things in reverse -- the source is more mysterious than what we see.

The sunlight flows every which way from these dark places. The foundation is darkness -- light is like something placed on top. It's not as real.

Well, should we be scared? I'm not scared at all.

They would look back at the house. Sometimes the back door was open, sometimes Aunt Estelle, practically a widow, was standing on the porch. She wasn't monitoring them, she was simply there. She was always half doing something and half listening to the sound of children's voices. So it seemed.

Her little prayer book in her lap. The children turned and dismissed her from consciousness but not completely. Aunt Estelle. Warm and quiet. Touching the links of the chain on her neck as though it were -- almost a rosary or some such thing.

There was a pond in the back yard, the keeper of the moist stones. Tadpoles and the whiff of frogs. Fish who would surface for food and then suddenly sink into nonexistence, if existence is appearance. Beyond it, more fields and the touch of forest. The land was too still to belong to anyone. In hide and seek, so many hiding places, one had to make the effort to be found. Pine needles on the pathway, don't run barefoot. Smells of honey and tar.

There was the preternatural clarity of an intense single moment. Yes but it went on for years and years.

Look at the way those branches -- those pine branches, those branches of pine -- they almost make a square, the way they are posed in the clearing. And look at that three legged dog!

Una and Jorge wanted to catch the dog and make it a pet but -- oddly and wonderfully enough -- it ran too fast to be caught.

As though its piercing disfigurement needed to be -- here and only here -- caressed and furthered -- within the Garden of Orthodoxy that bound them all.

So the dog ran, free and free forever. And the 2 children knew better than to chase it into the infinity in which it lived.

For they knew -- and this was the Orthodoxy -- not to go too far.

Did they know? In fact, did they? Dusk would be falling, not the dusk, but the state just before dusk, a sort of tableau of clear glareless light, the anticipation of gloom. The outer woods were ahead of them, with the big campus on the other side. We'd better go back, Una said. Dinner will be waiting for us.

At the edge of the wood was where the feeling of rightness began to thin, like scarce oxygen on a mountain height.

Una, protected by an instinct her brother didn't have, would pull at his hand. The aunt would be waiting patiently for them at the back door. It was amazing how dark it suddenly was, how quickly the day's light had been sucked away. But oh how good existence was!

END OF PART ONE

*

Poem: A Struggle

*

There comes a moment when she pulls away.
You find yourself fighting the very thing
you recognize and know: that she consents
to her own going, but more, as she goes
she both consents and was forced to consent
because death has become not just the choice
but what is choosing, and is what she wants,
not "wants" but can no longer not. This death
of her resistance is the death of her.
And you are also forced this other way,
to hold her here, to keep her "secular"
against her will. You have to. You have to.
You must do what your God has asked you to:
keep her alive, but she just wants to go.

*

The worm and his killer

*

Ooo! Pierced.

"I am a worm and not a man."

So there it is.

The little worm slithered along the path that his worminess made. God looked down and loved his worm, that was taken for a given. It wasn't a path or a skeleton, or a safety net, just a given.

Sun, that ambiguous good, beat down.

The orioles chirred and whivered in the palm tree. They did not eat the worm nor did the woodpecker peck it.

There was a moment of not being pecked. Existence, the richest robe, the brightest gemstone, always a match for your birth.

The words of existence were few. You cannot have too much of it and you cannot hate it because even your hatred would be more existence. To exist is inexplicable and wonderful.

The worm slithered in the middle way. Neither fear nor confidence but the middle way. Not happy, not un-, the middle. Purposeful, drifting? Neither. Predator, prey? Neither one. Kind or mean? Not that. Boastful? Humble? Not there yet. Striving, at rest? Musical or dumb?

In the middle of the middle of the middle.

There was a little child with her foot in the air. Coming down, coming down. Gratuitous shape, death in shoes. Now does the cut worm really forgive the plow? Does it really? Does it really? Is that just what the plowman says?

The worm traveled neither in forgiveness nor unforgiveness, no, but the middle way, in between. Not afraid, not unafraid, no, not brave, not cowardly, not hopeful, not exactly. Ready? Open? Hopeful without grounds for hope? Existence too abundant to simply be boxed in this world?

The worm rested in God's hand, which was not a material object and was not subject to sun. A human foot was a thread it wove.

If you love God's work, you love all of it.

I will aim for the heart, the little child thought.

But she couldn't see the heart. It eluded her and twisted.

*

If hope was a sickness, the worm had no wish to get well.

*

Now if the child had simply walked away, she would be a person who had no story, which is like damnation, not having a story. But she stayed and looked down. The nisus had fled and the creature was in pieces. It was "dead" -- what is "dead"?

It is irreversible, right?

So she cried to see the irreversible mess beneath her foot. The yolk would not go back into its shell. It clung to her and defined her.

Tears of accountability.

Bottomless pain -- and everyone had it in some way. A person's story.

"I am a worm and not a man."

END OF PART ONE

*

In time the girl grew over the hole where she once killed a worm. It existed and hurt inside her. Her husband would laugh at her delicacies and phobias. Every corner of our house has a spider, honey. Why not get rid of just a few of them?

You would open a book in this house and a spider would leap out, a little fist of congealed ink.

Let it be.

Wherever the woman went, cats and dogs and children would materialize around her. It is odd how safe and strong a basically timid person could feel.

There was some Buddhist sage who lived in a hut filled with cobras. He didn't bother them and they didn't bother him. He was only careful where he sank his foot.

She attended a rather pokey church near the university. Her husband refused to go. Organ music from a time long ago -- that was what characterized the church. She was comfortable in her great discomfort there.

The sermons merely restated things long known from the gospels. The same ideas were shuffled around and re-voiced. She felt that this was appropriate.

The hymns used phrases that no real person ever ever ever could have said. They were not exactly God's words but certainly not the words of a human. She found some melodious sonnet rolling on her tongue.

One day a young woman wandered into the church and sat down. She was not appropriately dressed, not suitable, she looked like a flower child or really a grass child, as though she'd just gotten up from the grass. The worshippers unconsciously did that horrible thing that worshippers did: they moved away as if she were unclean. They stared at the stranger, forgetting even Leviticus. Elise -- shy as all get-out and far from either a mover or a shaker -- stood up and sat next to the stranger, took her hand. it was as soft and boneless as a worm. The girl was as fragile as a worm.

They went to lunch and shared stories but later in the day the elder woman couldn't remember a word of it -- just that the girl was Una. She was "one" then. But one of exactly what?

That evening, leafing through the paper, Elise found the girl's picture among the stories of brief wonders and accidental deaths. She didn't say anything to anyone. Scott kept his own counsel as always.

She set up a cot in the back room. Her husband raised his eyebrows -- just a millimeter or two -- and said nothing. Since that was characteristic, one didn't really know what it meant.

The old hymns rolled like wagon wheels through the old woman's head. Oh, not so old really. Perhaps neither one was altogether old.

*

Does that girl live here or not? Scott asked.

I feel there's a ghost in this house.

*

Before Elise went to bed she tried to run through some form of evening prayer. As always, she was too tired to focus. It often became a deep and debilitating nap.

Sometimes the psalms were there in the core of dream and sometimes they were absent.

As she fell asleep the book in her hands softened and morphed, it began to move slowly. It was so soft that the slightest squeeze would crush it. It had an ever-newborn feel.

She knew who she was holding. "Oh Lord, my heart is not lifted up, my eyes are not raised too high." The most beautiful one submitted oneself, himself, to utter danger, even the danger of being despised. Our God had no shell, no armor.

Elise woke up shaking and in deepest devotion -- deep in the most pierced place there was. What do I do now? Where do I move from here?

What else was there to do but what you always did? The heavy woman pulled herself somehow out of the chair's suction grip. She put on what passed for a nightie then she brushed her teeth. She navigated herself to the underground region of her husband's snore. She lowered herself to bed and lay herself down.

*

The worm's soliloquy

*

Here is what I know about myself.

I am a worm and not a man.

If I do something worthy of a man, it is not me, it must have been you who have done it.


"I fell silent and did not open my mouth,*
for surely it was you that did it."


Although I have never committed a murder, my hands have this strangling thing intrinsically threaded through them. They shake with it, a worm's ghostly vertebrae. I will not deny. I will not deny. I will stop denying.

I am not -- no no -- in no way sexually attracted to children and so what terrible thing inside me impels me to insist on even saying that? Why is it necessary?

I am not different from others in feeling impelled, whenever I see something soft and vulnerable, to crush it, and this even though I myself am soft and vulnerable and essentially without defenses.

What stops me from being myself? You do, Lord.

You are restraint. You are the stopping of my native self-hoaxing. When I don't feel you elsewhere I feel you there. And this is my true vertebrae, not the other one. Insofar as you hold me back, strip me and lay me low, I love you.

Restraint is in itself a good, but I am a creature of the American 60s, the time of the worm, and so my zipper is always down, my belly and my dick exposed, everything always open and all over the place until I too am disgusted. I do not know how of myself to find measure and be measure and live within measure, to be just so. Not everywhere and everything all over the place, not standing nowhere talking on my cellphone or watching the abyss of a dancing monitor, no no no, but to be measure and to be just so. No more no less no other.

You know all this, God. Why can't i just submit to you? But in fact I know the answer.

I am a worm and not a man.

*

The worm on the cement

*

He called himself a worm but the worms called him an untouchable.

*

So what did the worm do then? He pretended to be okay. He simulated the sort of life that someone who was okay would have. He pulled himself bodily out of the darkness, the mud, the massed bed that bore our color and light. Blinking like a blindman he surfaced into the light and stretched. The world was good and he himself was perfectly normal. Right with God. Average in the sin department, neither a case of bragging nor of shame. Ha ha people said. A worm and not a man. Made an S on the cement and then a question mark. He shivered, finally revealing the truth about himself. He knew that God would have mercy on who he was, not who he pretended to be.

Feet came down solidly on the sidewalk and just missed him or else they didn't.

*