This is a short section of something bigger I have been working on for some time called "Handstand Fistfight".

  I've been hanging around with Jesus promoting his new line of clothes, and eau du toilet, called White Robes. We go Mason jar drinking the urine of drunks, who are washed up in brick town. Jesus is identifiable by a tattoo of Barbie on his left calf. He says it's cause he's hornier than a Ken doll and follows it up with,

"Finally she got bendable limbs. Virtue is a chore. Take the test orally, he says. You're wasting time anyways. I have a bunch to spare; it was given to me in a brown paper bag disguised as a liquor bottle. You should take a napalm shower to cleanse your vitals. Those goddamn crabs are silent, sneaky fuckers bit me when I tried to break the bread."

 Next thing I remember, we're both crawling around like a baby with forks stuck in its eyes, groping blindly trying to feel our surroundings like we're experiencing the world for the first time.

 He continues on with "Eat my swollen digits. One through none. It's a fast paced rat race, mechanical men taught me to tie a tie, and there ain't no organic female gonna bring me back to earth.

 Jesus looks sad. He's slumped over and leaning against a dumpster with tiny particles of froth and spit in the corners of his beard, and continues to moan out like he is home sick with a belly ache. I just sit there staring vacant and thinking about how I probably don't look much better.

  Slowly the words begin to slip, pathetically from his mouth. "Melody is a girl, not a sound, and she whispers the secrets of the universe, plotting the way with my lazy bones that she pried from the fossils of a winged creature and a featherless bird. Touch my eyelids, he says, they are cold, and I cannot see through them anymore. Remember Piggy and the death of knowledge? The savage reality that his spectacles had the wrong lens to start a fire, and what was his reward? Ehn? Bashed in the skull with a rock, Is that the fate that awaits me? Cause I'll be ready when it comes."

 A man comes walking past with a harmonica, I can't really see straight, but Jesus makes a valiant effort to stand. He doesn't get any further than shifting about on his hands and knees until eventually he kind of half rolls, half plops back down on his ass with his back up against the dumpster again.

  "Minstrel, he yells out, tune em, tune em to the key of me or in a blink my happiness will be over."

The man stops and says nothing, but continues to blow out long slow notes that seem to lull Jesus until he's not moving, or saying anything. I close my and think about how Jesus never thought like the rest of us. He was like a nail in an apple slowly rusting while the fruit around him rots. Like he was not really swimming in the ocean, but just treading water and waiting to eventually go under.

  Suddenly he pipes up with. "They say that drowning is a beautiful way to die, everything becomes crystal clear for one moment that is extended to eternity until the release of the spirit molecule takes us to the other side into that great unbeknownst to us."

 "So is your sacrifice really worth that moment of eternal beauty?" The whiskey makes me stumble on my tongue as I speak.

"Who's to say? What would they say?"

"Can words even express the Ideas you are trying to get across?"

 Jesus laughs a little. "A cross, one cross, and an army of me all wearing housecoats, and delivering salvation one injection at a time. Deliver me from temptation into the hands of belief, the true saviour of local minds."

"What is it with this comical limitation on what one mind can do?" I ask. "The proof is in the seven year arm."

"Do you really think that some guy in India grabbed a piece from the cosmos and left his fingerprints on someone else's mind?" His tone, oozing with sarcasm, quickly snaps serious with, "Who am I to be stranger than most? Wouldn't the strangest thing be if I just stopped? Maybe then all that I have been trying to explain would finally make sense. Or would you count me as a fake, a phoney, and a has been? Who knows, maybe I'm over?"

"Maybe your climax was cramped in the back of a steamy Volkswagon, while brave children were leaning on the windows as they mad their way to school?"

He ignores me and continues on by responding to his own questions of insecurity.

"But if this were true, if this were truth moving faster now, faster than it ever was before, my pale and lanky body, undetectable by God, would exist only in the heart on my sleeve so that my fondness of lies could be seen by everyone."

 Jesus tells me he thinks it's funny, and that other times it's not. The big question though, is how can he be so nonchalant about it all? And how can he always be so right even when I don't understand? But it still makes sense. Like tectonic plates his is a movement of great magnitude. The constant changing of this movement never questions where the power or the force behind these plates lay, or is that lies? It may shake things up every once and a while, and indeed it can be said that it never really needs to be known what exactly it moves from, or towards, resting assured that any vision/destination will always be a starting point for the next instant of change.

"So how can you comment on a way of living, only to turn around and profess a winning combination of ideals?" I snap at him.

 Jesus calmly offers up his thoughts to me. "I have often opened my big and crazy mouth, only to silently scream as loud as I can the next day. So, sometimes, I look in the mirror and say hello Buddha, what is the nature of you? Buddha thinks perhaps I am discredited as a deity because I am aware of my title and nature. He says, I carry around the sadness of the Samuri, and in lies the source of my inexplicable love. But I think Buddha beats around the bush. I think that perhaps he feels uncomfortable in his title and nature because he is aware of it, and such an awareness tends to set a standard that all I's would like him to meet. You see, for Buddha to believe in himself would undoubtedly result in a failure of all required, and desired tasks."

 Mindless and mind full I reach out to grab on to him. I think about all my anger. And why does it make me so happy, like the thought of Christ and Buddha agreeing to disagree. This is all to sudden, I feel sick, but I'm beginning to see the choice of his beautiful drowning with its gasps of clarity about how the truth is actually Gods own voice, spoken and echoed across everything infinite. When I look up at his two eyes trained to drift and dream, somewhere inside his head sunlight lights up his mind and spills out his once conquered laugh.

"You know, he says between laughter, Strum me like a chord and I might not always vibrate in tune, sometimes it hurts ears and other times it soothes hearts, but at least I'm making noise."  With those words he stands and hands me the ass end of a half bottle of whisky. "Lose yourself, wander down with me a while, I want to find the place where those voices are coming from."

 His talk is quiet, but louder than ever, he has an unseen intention to disclose little secret information. I feel like he's moving me along way across with out actually taking me there. We stumble into a park and every thing is starting to feel like one more, crazy joke that ends with another no sleep night. We fall over behind a thick bush that feels close to the voices. It makes my eyeballs capsize and it's me that I'm pointing at, up there and out, and a little in between. It's odd to be so gone that you become a stranger and all you really hear is this piece and that section until there is this constant need for one more word, but as I start creeping through the bush looking for the rest, clock, pop, and sock in my thick brick skull, Jesus points out at a dog digging franticly beneath a bush across from us.

"Dumb is dumb." I say, "Something must be buried there."

 With his eyes still carefully trained on the mutt, and screaming so I can hear him, Jesus whispers in my ear. "There are little levers that are being pulled, and if people factored in and remembered how terrifying the word suddenly is, everyone would know what all this work means to me. So you can bat your lashes at the smouldering heap left behind by an empire of plastic jugs, and aluminum cans, and you can map the options they offer to hero's who have started zeroing in on the lives of  all those people full of stories that are truly made of gold, but break down, dissect, and disarm, then you will see that all of this as just a little piece of you and I, and you will be able to comfortably say hello alone, and all together at once. It's never really the same twice, but it's always so familiar."