Jesus, etc.

Christ is dry on my tongue and I am a puddle of digression.

I am, perhaps, the term personified. As if a single one of us isn't, now. Catholics
in his house, kneeling and thinking that in the morning we'll draw straws

to see who makes the omelets. We're a splatter of pea coats and sweaters
and hairloss. Too in-between the ages that remember Jesus. The Nicene

Creed is projected on the wall because we don't know it. It should
have been in Latin like I've heard it used to be for all the good we did it.

And I remember Jimmy, telling me with a mouth full of Dutchmaster
that you have to keep it wet so it won't rip. His thumbs working to crack the spine

and spill the dirt and the shit onto the floor. Like a surgeon. Or
maybe like something else, which escapes me. And I remember Junior

year, and how stupid I was. I wonder if I'm as stupid now. Now
that I've come full-circle on the subject of intimacy and landed

nowhere. Like it won't change tomorrow. Like it ever stops. Maybe
it's the way things move around me when the bathroom is dank that makes

people climb out of their people-costumes and stop reciting Shakespeare.
And when someone puts The New Radicals on I feel my own people-costume feather

like molted spiderwebs-- crumbling under the implications of the past
tense and exactly what it is to be too anything. Late, late, late--

like my grandmother who always asked how my girlfriend was. I would protest
at the embarrassment of being eleven and treated like I thought about girls like that

(which I did). Now I think I'd lie. "She's fine, Grandma. Beautiful." And maybe
she'd smile. As I write I realize grandma never met a girlfriend. As big an injustice

as any. Jimmy's name isn't Jimmy. But the idea is the same-- the tongue, like
it intended to send a letter. And I remember cracking the window and toweling

the door. And I remember Father's homily about being God's great masterpiece
and thinking it bullshit. And I remember the great sadness of regret

and the way it all rushed back like if Central America stopped and the East became
the West like it sometimes does in songs about believing. The sex

and how it wasn't important like the music was.

And I remember standing in the upstairs E wing
as I was recited lines I knew by heart.