the blood and the blessed air

You will not be sanctified by your laws and your resolutions. The application of your will and your faith will lead you true or astray, or nowhere really but the eased strains of distant music and the idea that you will be absolved. You spurn all the witness to your crimes, and carry the weight of judgement to wield upon friends and strangers. Chew your food carefully, choose just the right packet of stray words, observe the revelations and the passing clouds. This is not the road to salvation. The flaw isn't with the directions, or even your fractured vessel of self. The destination is askew, a riddle made of hunger and sustenance: a lie to make light of the work of the world.

As a child, they added strings to every song. As if the orchestral complications would imbue some grace that was absent. As if just the right lighting wouldn't still hide the truth. The trends vacillate between the simple and the complex, the person and the pack. Morality arising only to murder its children with its clinging to the abstract, reality just another construct made from the abrasions of the concrete. The song is as much the singer as the singing, the blood and the blessed air in between. The singular answer arrives late and often wrong. The system is in a state of constant ecstatic collapse. Here and there, a violin will do. Now and again, the rhythm section can do without even a drum.

The insolubility of a problem leads to rich strains of invective and ill conclusions, forgetting the central lesson of all true work. The job is never finished, our work here goes on, even with our passing. We approach the wounds of failed tasks and poor solutions with our starched collars and laundered souls, and mistake the inevitable strains for betrayal. Our brother falls one thousand times, we pick him up a thousand and one times. Our sister plunges into the depths one thousand times, then we swim and swim. We have mistaken what we want for what we need, what is for what must be. Change is all that is certain, and so we hold ourselves to random choices, bounds and means. You will fail, as we all must. Amidst sin and confusion, you will never be lost for long. We will hold you, as we hold ourselves: despite and because of this world's workings.