A church is any 2 who meet with me
"For where 2 or 3 are gathered together in my name, I am there among them".
- Matthew 18:20
At any given moment there are more prayers than answers and I am wondering around the city centre looking at yet another obelisk - Waypoint of a seafarer back to
Nile merchant ships but there is no river to return to Only the sun gripping the city air Strange lands Made up of too many people
A church is any 2 who meet with me along the way
But this hasn’t stopped them from building chapels, monuments and ceilings
that need an audience of 1 hundred thousand Higher wayfarer far out for purposes unclear and here in the centre of these lower marshes
The trodden primordial body is suffocating
The souls of 2 or 3 men and only men can brush their hands across the cages of the altar
as the schoolchildren’s feet are clanking on the ceiling
Later the priests will become children again
and all children know the way home
all children can build obelisks
and all children are churches
a river that will not connect to the shore for a great many years
rocks that have not nestled into the coast and shorelines unbroken
are all made of mothers
At any given moment I am 1 of a half walking alone in a strange city
where only my mother speaks the language- holding the bricklayers and the painters
and the men who line the cement ceilings with gold
she is not made of them
she is made of
only a mother and she is a language onto herself
Inside of 2 halves there is only her, holding soil eroding against herself
Made of starry compass celestial body and maps too large to be remembered by the many
Made of music softly ricocheting down these empty medieval streets
A church is a mother, 1 mother meeting herself on the riverbank,
holding her child, who is made of herself,
and gently pushing the basket downstream.
and as she takes her first steps beyond the ocean, there are more hands than needed,
pushing her forward, so I look away and turn to the obelisk for a history,
towards myself as a half, and then when I am forgotten and half empty,
She reminds me
a church is any 2 who meet within me,
and I am made of 1000 mothers
Jesus for the shareholders
"My house will be called a house of prayer, but you are making it a den of robbers." Matthew 21:13
That you took cattle and sheep
and herded their trinkets at the foothold of the temple
That there were gods you peddled in the marketplace like merchants
and those gods were the hands of man running under the table
running up her leg
That you would open a holy book
take out a holy word crush it with your fist
and sprinkle it into her drink
And that if your hands of man were not guilty of this act
that instead, you kneeled down
perching on her ankle
whispering in her ear
this is the word of the Lord
That you take hands of love and extract what is left of the word
That your fathers and mothers were farmers and brothers of the world
That you take their livestock down into the temple for slaughter
That your act of conversion is not a sin
That you take one hand and brush it across the altar
and with the other you rip apart her walls
That you spit on the Earth’s primordial body
and you rip apart the bodies of earth
Then when there is nothing left
and no false gods to worship
you start to pray
That your bankrupt business is salvaged and bolstered again and again
so your golden towers can be erected
on top of the chapel doors
forever
That you have forgotten that once a man stood at the foot of the church
and overturned the tables of the money changers
and the seats of those who sold doves
That the house of the Lord requires a contractor
who does not want to sell the bricks to the highest bidder
That business concludes at her feet
before you enter her temple
That you have declared today and forever
Let money be made on the body of the Lord,
Let her body be used and discarded
Let slaughter be more than cattle and sheep
Let slaughter be the name of this temple
I too, would have been Leonard Cohen if it were not for the supermarket
“and other forms of boredom advertised as poetry”
-Leonard Cohen, New Skin for the Old Ceremony
once again it all becomes the bonfire
men in caves leading tribes away from the desert
once again there is poverty in this story
and the poet of the picket line and the poet of the magazine
selling digital remedies for the end times
the altar
replaced by the
supermarket
the last congregation
passes around a bag of Doritos
the communion becomes the telephone
and you are supersonic
ricocheting down the dairy aisle
sanctifying all the cold cuts you commune
III.
my father tells me the algorithm has died/that there was a man selling eulogies/brewing syrups/blind/medicine and snake oil for the healing/come forward/he would say/come towards the centre of the digital/commune with me as if were the pastor/kneel
kneel before flopping pixel
IV.
the angels take the last train out of Manhattan
you stopped driving sometime after dusk
the car broke down and
you slammed the door behind you
anger in the streetlight
you walked out towards the forest
I watched you
from a distance
holding the soil of some distant holy land
I closed my eyes before you started praying
when I returned you were gone
nothing left
only instructions to travel west
V.
god becomes the comic book movie
the pulp beaten out of the paper
out my eyes - forgetting how to glaze over
there is always something to look at
god help me there is always something to look at
VI.
I wrote this letter to you to curb my consumption
To stop my fingers growing fatter
Love in the time of quantities
I begin to eat my pen
VII.
when you call my mother after dinner
tell her I have gone to bed
that my spirit stopped growing older
in the church of the television
that stasis usurped enlightenment
and that I could not bear the weight of it
tell her
I was not afraid of the introduction
only I was scared to speak in the contemporary voice
cannibalised and hardy - I ate more than I needed
and before I finished dinner
I was in Amsterdam
spitting out fish bones
and listening to the sea
VIII.
music devours its son
something in its eyes
removes the mundane from the skin
someone pawns the ceremony off for scraps
the living go on breathing
buying groceries
driving further out of town
and writing everything down
only now there is no boredom in poetry
and nothing left to sell
