CONFESSION ZERO (The Weaver's Song)

The wormhole, paradise, hauls its wave above the injured in my spirit.

His soldiers, with their blistering certainty marching forward with their cleansed bodies, upright breasts, asses and protruding masculinities, look down and see before them a naked and lifeless child on the floor. God, they imagined, placed the infant there as sign, glint of light shining down on the divine churches golden base.

A few cradled the dead child while others built a pyre at the foot of their Christ. They laid the eager body upon its cradle and declared, “We are yours!” and lit the brittle timber.

Falling to their knees and repeating their mantra they watched their sacrifice melt.

First the soft hair of the child curled up with the flames, then sparked by the heat it ruptured into ash. Then came the tender flesh covering the ears which melted like wax, dripping down into the flame it sizzled and popped and drooped to its loss.

Then the skin on the palms of the hands and the heels of the feet oozed down onto the embers and the babies tender bottom and back and shoulders began to sag into the fire as the eyes melted into the skull, feeding the fire into the brain, and the soldiers of Christ still moaned and prattled their pledge.

Soon the liquefied skin had formed a cocoon around all that remained- the lungs, heart, liver, kidneys, gallbladder, pancreas, and brain- the stomach, spleen, colon, small intestines, bladder and bone.

A rancid smell filled the church as did the warrior’s blabber and moan floating out of the fire of God’s blessing. As the noise of sacrifice grew louder still, the child’s body grew white-hot and began to quake! The revelers saw this and became so frightened that they ran like a herd of cattle from the church.

When they were all gone, and the church was silent of fear, the baby suddenly burst open with the breath of peace upon it…

I have been witness to the four pillars and see no reason to carry death there. Doesn’t the world know that life moves for more than just the sons of Abraham?

O! I see the stunned throats floating by in the dusk to their stiff-limbed sleep as metal rains down over the Jordan’s western prophet, children dying there.

I am here, waiting, breathing in the dusk under the shadow of the patriarch, asking, can we again build the shrine inside the soul and leave our flesh to time?

Odd is it that I should think of clothing while looking at such horrific pictures.

What ragged soul bore the tattered shirt I wear? What insistent thrashing from the fuming globe did the arms in these ragged sleeves undergo? Of their troubles... might I know?

A second hand story, a second hand building, second hand smoke curling allegiance to breath, second hand food, second hand clothing. ...Death.

Every piece of clothing I own has a hole in it somewhere; a tear, a stubborn thread, shrunken look, sedated color, a missing button, a snag, a raging crinkle, or furled collar, not unlike my heart over the genocide of a people.