The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations Millennium General Assembly Read Online Free PDF

that might’ve been rubber,
    deaf as a cockroach, finished as a singer.
    Brothers, I spilled myself along the roads.
    Mold grew on me as I dampened in alleys.
    I began in ignorance. How could I know
    that whoever is grinding up his soul is making
    himself afresh? That the ones who run away
    get nearer all the time? Look here or there,
    it’s always the horizon, the dull edge
    of earth dicing your plan like a potato.
    Does water break the light, or light the water?
    Which do you choose: what is or what is?
    I painted myself black and let that color
    ride through virgins like the penises
    they dream of while their fathers sleep. I lied.
    I cheated like a shark. I robbed the dead.
    Nothing healed me, just as nothing healed
    my uncle of himself—but he was healed,
    while I grew phosphorescent with a kind
    of cancer that I carried like a domino,
    a tiny badge discovering me…
    Oh please my love I want to rock and roll with you
    Feel it feel it
    feel it all night like a shoe…
    Ten years I wasted all I had, and then
    ten years I lived correctly—held a job
    in a factory that made explosions,
    where deafness was an asset. I did well,
    I never missed a day, I polished late,
    honed my skills, received promotions—in the end
    I built explosions for atomic bombs,
    forty-three I built myself, which one of these
    days will deafen you, as I am deafened.
    I wrenched the fraternal orders with my tale
    of sorrowful delinquency—the Elks,
    the Lions, Moose; those animals, they loved
    the crippled rock’n’roller with the heart
    wrung out as empty as his former mind,
    and variously and often they cited me.
    I walked the malls with an expanded chest,
    took my sips with my pinkie cocked,
    firing dry martinis at my larynx
    and yearning for the strength of soul it takes
    to suck a bullet from an actual
    pistol, hating my own drained face
    as I intimidated mirrors, or stood
    in a jail of lies before the Eagle Scouts,
    an alarm clock going off inside an alarm clock
    in a lump of iron inside a lump of iron:
    hating myself for having become my father.
    At night I prayed aloud to God and Jesus
    to place me on a spaceship to the moon—
    Heaven, I told Them constantly, my mind
    is tired of me, and I would like to die.
    Take me to ground zero take me to ground zero
    where in the midst of detonation it is useless
    to demonstrate quod erat demonstrandum,
    this was my ceaseless prayer, until my lips
    were muscles and my heart could talk,
    telling it over and over to itself;
    until they fired me and drove me to the edge
    of things, and dumped my prayer into the desert.
    Drinking cactus milk and eating sand,
    I wandered until I saw the monastery
    standing higher and higher, at first a loose
    mirage, but soon more real than I was.
    There I fell on my face, and let light carry
    me into the world—just as my uncle told it
    nine million years ago when I was eight—
    and the prison of my human shape exploded,
    my heart cracked open and the blood poured out
    over stones that got up and walked when it touched them.
    High in the noon, some kind of jet plane winked
    like a dime; I saw it also flashed
    over the vast, perfumed, commercial places
    filled with stupid but well-intentioned people,
    the wreckages and ambushes of love
    putting themselves across, making it pay
    in the margins of the fire, in the calm spaces,
    taken across the dance-floor by a last romance,
    kissing softly in a hallucination strewn
    with bus tickets and an originless music—
    and now death comes to them, a little boy
    in a baseball cap and pyjamas, doing things
    to the locks of the heart…This was my vision.
    Here I saw the truth of the horizon,
    the way of coming and going in this life.
    I never drifted up from my beginning:
    I rose as inexorably as heat.
    Brothers, I reached you, and you took me in.
    You saw me when I was invisible,
    you spoke to me when I was deaf,
    you thanked me when I was a secret,
    and how will I make of myself