Saturday, February 25, 2006

except that I gave the filthy things up, true.

I will say a prayer for you - yes, you - on a day not so far from now. When the day starts at midnight, when I am as far from the sun as I can be, while you lay sleeping, unaware perhaps that I even exist, I will be laying out my slips of paper and my cheap ballpoints, I will take a few drags from an unfiltered cigarette and leave the rest to smolder in offering, and I will say this prayer for you:

Rise up, little prayer, little verse, little song, rise up on the smoke and fly away. Fly to the one I pray for, fly and hover over them and let them gently breathe you in. Go, little prayer, I've put everything I know and do not understand into you, because I know that hidden in a seeming ocean of mysteries there is a truth that is not meant for me, that only they can understand. Go and never tell them the thought was mine first, because you were never mine, you were always theirs, before there was life, before there was earth, before there was time you waited unspoken, you waited to be said, by them and them alone.

And you will wake, thinking you remember a dream, the rich and tantalyzing images dissolving to nothing but a feeling even as the reality of it all settles down around you in its familiar pattern. When you need it, that prayer will be waiting to come to your lips, perfectly formed.

klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.

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