A church is any 2 who meet with me

"For where     2   or 3 are gathered together in my name,  I am there among them".      

  • Matthew 18:20

At any given moment there are more prayers than answers and I am wondering around the city centre looking at yet another obelisk - Waypoint of a seafarer back to

Nile merchant ships but there is no river to return to Only the sun gripping the city air Strange lands Made up of too many people 


A church is any 2 who meet with me along the way

But this hasn’t stopped them from building chapels, monuments and ceilings 

that need an audience of 1 hundred thousand   Higher wayfarer         far out        for purposes unclear   and here in the centre of these lower marshes

The trodden primordial body is suffocating


The souls of 2 or 3 men and only men    can brush their hands across the cages of the altar

as the schoolchildren’s feet are clanking on the ceiling 


Later the priests will become children again


and all children know the way home

all children can build obelisks 

and all children are churches


a river that will not connect to the shore for a great many years  


rocks that have not nestled into the coast and shorelines unbroken

are all made of mothers



At any given moment I am 1 of a half walking alone in a strange city 

where only my mother speaks the language-       holding the bricklayers and the painters

and the men who line the cement ceilings with gold

she is not made of them

she is made of 

only a mother and she is a language onto herself 


Inside of 2 halves there is only her, holding soil eroding against herself 


Made of starry compass celestial body and maps too large to be remembered by the many

    Made of music softly ricocheting down these empty medieval streets 


A church is a mother, 1 mother meeting herself on the riverbank,

holding her child, who is made of herself,


and gently pushing the  basket downstream. 


and as she takes her first steps beyond the ocean, there are more hands than needed, 

pushing her forward, so I look away     and turn to the obelisk for a history,

towards myself as a half, and then when I am forgotten and half empty,

She reminds me  

a church is any 2 who meet within me, 


and I am made of 1000 mothers

Jesus for the shareholders

"My house will be called a house of prayer, but you are making it a den of robbers."    

                                                                                     Matthew 21:13


That you took cattle and sheep 

and herded their trinkets at the foothold of the temple


That there were gods you peddled in the marketplace like merchants

and those gods were the hands of man running under the table

running up her leg


That you would open a holy book

   take out a holy word crush it with your fist

         and sprinkle it into her drink


And that if your hands of man were not guilty of this act

that instead, you kneeled down

perching on her ankle

whispering in her ear

   this is the word of the Lord


That you take hands of love and extract what is left of the word

That your fathers and mothers were farmers and brothers of the world


That you take their livestock down into the temple for slaughter

That your act of conversion is not a sin


That you take one hand and brush it across the altar

and with the other you rip apart her walls


That you spit on the Earth’s primordial body

and you rip apart the bodies of earth


Then when there is nothing left

        and no false gods to worship

  you start to pray


That your bankrupt business is salvaged and bolstered        again and again

       so your golden towers can be erected 

          on top of the chapel doors

            forever 


That you have forgotten that once a man stood at the foot of the church

and overturned the tables of the money changers 

and the seats of those who sold doves


That the house of the Lord requires a contractor

who does not want to sell the bricks to the highest bidder


That business concludes at her feet

before you enter her temple


That you have declared today and forever


Let money be made on the body of the Lord,

       Let her body be used and discarded

              Let slaughter be more than cattle and sheep

                     Let slaughter be the name of this temple

I too, would have been Leonard Cohen if it were not for the supermarket 


I

once again it all becomes the bonfire 

men in caves leading tribes away from the desert


once again there is poverty in this story 

and the poet of the picket line and the poet of the magazine 

selling digital remedies for the end times


II.


the altar 

replaced by the 

supermarket 


the last congregation 

passes around a bag of Doritos 


the communion becomes the telephone 

and you are supersonic


ricocheting down the dairy aisle 

sanctifying all the cold cuts you commune 


III.


my father tells me the algorithm has died/that there was a man selling eulogies/brewing syrups/blind/medicine and snake oil for the healing/come forward/he would say/come towards the centre of the digital/commune with me as if were the pastor/kneel


kneel before flopping pixel


IV. 


the angels take the last train out of Manhattan 

you stopped driving sometime after dusk

the car broke down and 

you slammed the door behind you 

anger in the streetlight 

you walked out towards the forest 


I watched you 

from a distance 

holding the soil of some distant holy land


I closed my eyes before you started praying


when I returned you were gone

nothing left

only instructions to travel west


V. 


god becomes the comic book movie 

the pulp beaten out of the paper 

out my eyes - forgetting how to glaze over

there is always something to look at


god help me there is always something to look at


VI. 


I wrote this letter to you to curb my consumption 

To stop my fingers growing fatter 


Love in the time of quantities 

I begin to eat my pen 


VII. 


when you call my mother after dinner 

tell her I have gone to bed 


that my spirit stopped growing older 

in the church of the television 

that stasis usurped enlightenment 

and that I could not bear the weight of it 


tell her 

I was not afraid of the introduction 

only I was scared to speak in the contemporary voice 

cannibalised and hardy - I ate more than I needed 

and before I finished dinner 

I was in Amsterdam

spitting out fish bones 

and listening to the sea


VIII. 


music devours its son

something in its eyes  

removes the mundane from the skin 

someone pawns the ceremony off for scraps


the living go on breathing 

buying groceries 

driving further out of town 

and writing everything down 


only now there is no boredom in poetry  

and nothing left to sell

Proto deities

            for Francis  


the hunter-gatherer 

expresses his faith in the mechanics of the universe 

by burying his feet in the soil 

allowing it to shift under the sun 

and sleeping in its church 


all pulls of nature are microcosmic gods 

tugging on each other’s tails 

coagulating centrifugal forces 

upholding the planet for no particular reason 

other than to exist 

this will come to be known as faith 


soon there will be scars from provenance

and new gods who wrestle on the story 

spoken planes of existence to worship 


but for now

the hunter-gatherer 

puts one foot behind the last 

this becomes communion 


the prayer is the earth shifting 

continental spiritual drift 

one tribe to another 

exchanging nothing but movement 

the functional traffic of energy 

later this becomes known as war


too practical to get swept up in dogma

the hunter-gatherer raises a rock to the sky

for no particular reason 

other than to block the sun

this is misinterpreted as worship

and becomes the first death 


expressing his faith in the corpse on the ground

the first shaman picks up the rock

and declares it the effigy of the one true god 


the shaman razes the earth

and sanctifies the new world 

built on the expression of faith

that the universe has always belonged to us 

the

last man

on earth

makes a sandwich

he layers root

over crust

and travels

across fields

and deserts

through culture

to language

without

ever leaving the sofa

because

he is

all there is now







the

last man

on earth

makes another

sandwich

and unscrews

all the clocks

he comes across

he makes no history

no record

because

he is

all that

has been now






he reads

every book

in every language

he eats the covers

and spits

the spines out

across the edges

of the

supermarket

where he buys

ingredients

for yet another

sandwich







the

last man

on earth

becomes

the first

person

on 

earth

to write

poetry

all the

poetry

is his

now







he uses

the leftover

words

to make

one last

sandwich

before he

walks off

into the 

canyon

where he

never goes

hungry again

because

he has

seen it all

now