the blood/ ghost barrier (repost from April 9, 2009)

Here these folded hands tremble, clasping only the need to ask, the dead-end vapors and the bone sharp truth. Here the ceiling is surrendered to spiders and the sky to gray clouds and rain. What is prayer but abandonment? What is god but absence sensed from these unknowable depths, from this abysmal distance? What is it we ask for, and what are we asking? This world of torment and sunder, this crown of children disposed of in luggage, of babies used as sandbags and anchors and reasons to murder? These stupid books of ripe promise and brutal history? The idea that the existence of mysteries beyond our understanding is any more humble than the idea that the spinner of all wheels is waiting to hear our woes? Yet these muttered profanities are still spoken, in voices dry and aching as the dark. Yet these questions are spat out despite the emptiness of the room, the stillness of the air.

How strong the song is, the whispered hymnal of blood to ghost. It seethes in sheathe and action, bound by the decay of elements, the clockwork struggle to abide in this world of work and ache. It screams upon the naked pavement, cries out from the shards of skull of our shattered brothers, sings of iron and of air. That this music is alive in the dying meat, muscle struggling to shrug off these nettling questions, all the wonder of being subject and object all at once. We are the beasts so burdened with these frightened tunes and unbelievable heart beats, weathering steel and starvation, wounds and the every day dismissal that hauntings are carved from. What is god but the disbelief life has that it can ever fail to be? What are these songs but maps of pain and attraction, spilling out as vapor into the wreck and storm of another night alive?

What to ask for but simple survival and the best for kith and kin? What to demand but everything and all the trimmings? How cold, how lonely, how frightening comes this night that might be the last one. How fierce the urge to sweat and bleed and devour, to kiss and couple with myth and substance, every plan threaded with breath through teeth a claim upon creation. Every sleep we expect to shake a dream of a power over a land that will never be. Tomorrow is the cliff, the clock a pitfall into oblivion, time the only thing we can never have. So these hands gather, all Christmas list and birthday wishes, as my breath flows and my heart beats. I ask, as if there was more to god than bloody wood and broken promises. I ask, as if there is more here than this thirst and this lust, this hunger and this loneliness. I ask for tomorrow, my past forgotten, the sky open and empty save for a smattering of stars and the threat of rain.