that thins and threatens to abolish the voice/ but the wear of so much reaching for heaven? The chill of terror, the thrill of almost there, the calm tender triumph, which is barren from having gained everything by becoming its own opponent. We reach through the vulgar into something so delicate its eyes are forever blinking like a light in the dealer's mind, like a light in the addict's mind, like the blind shadow of the child trailing them both toward the timeless light of exchange that ritual refines and dims and brightens and dims and slurs and brightens and wins, nimble dancers with thick pixelated thighs rockaby and alibi the hour until it's ever so simple to remove the clock from the wall. Why don't we think of The Man like a clock? How the white god your momma worships has a black cock in her not-this-time, this time I'm not falling for the martyr myth, prayer written on a tear-soaked napkin, pathetic, until she reads it at the alter just when everyone was expecting a vow and a kiss and walks out. This is how we remix destiny using desire until the divine is just a matter of time and time is a black dancer you want her beauty to rhyme with her pain until she chooses you over words. Why didn't I think of that before? Why has slaughter become a thought away from the warmest love in all our hearts? In order. It goes like: a picture of wolves, another picture of wolves, then a picture of us making like vowels to run up and down a quartzcrowned mountain without slipping into race, not this time, this time I've crumpled the race card, corvette, dart board, space ship, cadillac grills, in a primavera silvergreen and the entire event is sealed in releasing until can't tell the difference between talking and singing and chanting and standing still. It makes no sense to keep pretending there is one. Heaven's really for the sinners, the song promises, the song stands still in a prom dress and feather light purple lights sway us awake as one word breaking to higher in the throat, not to be more, just to be higher than that place where meaning drives itself toward one particular object, just to be where the thing and the meaning of the thing are the same thing, we do our thing this way just to get there
