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I turn off the yellow lights so the bathroom is only red. The sound of the cheap projector spinning, humming quietly, endlessly. I close the door and I lock it and then close the door and I lock it and then I stand under the water. The drugs round the corners of the shower slightly and I'm able to stick my hand through the tile if I want but only if I want. I will always look for a crack in the wall through which to feel it. To touch it. To put it in my mouth and my mouth on it. It's easier when it is dark and when it is cold or when it is suffocatingly hot but always when I'm alone. It does not come to me where other people can see it, unless I take the drugs, at which point no one can see me though I can see all of them. I want to stare at the sun for a while, but not nakedly. Instead I hang up quilt over quilt and watch it try to get through. I want to take more drugs because I want to get high because I want to see it and wrap myself up in it. Maybe I should do drugs before I do interviews. I make all my music high out of my mind, it seems silly to talk about it later while sober. Do I even know what I'm talking about when I'm sober? I'm recounting a memory of an experience I had with God, now with God having left the room. I don't have to explain to you what I'm talking about it, you already know. I don't care who you are, you know. You've been alone at least once in your life so you know. I blacked out every window of my bedroom in the attic in Pennsylvania and I rocked back and forth on my bed with the drugs and I cried asking for it to come to me. I want it all the time. I am so angry that it will let me near but it won't let me stay. It's so cruel. It laughs at me when I realize we are not the same. I'm going to take more drugs and get in the shower and put my hand through the tile. I know you can hear me. It's happening to everybody.

The Consequence of Audience

As I went there through the long, long wood, I felt no-thing and I was no-thing and I was at ease. The grey ash trees and their mottled plumage were as one with each other, curving and branching to form a ceiling overhead. There was wide separation between trunks, creating vast corridors stretching off in all directions before me, behind me, all around me. O, what praise I could sing of that never-ending dusk fall I spent between those oaks! None came with me, none came upon me, for I was alone and I was at ease. Yet came the day the trees broke, the corridor ended, and I was thrust upon the rocky expanse that was the Great Dark. There I saw first face and heard footstep, few and far between, but I was no longer alone. It was a shameful deed to carry these two naked hands as they clenched hotly, now in full display for all to see. I had never noticed them in the wood, for I was at ease. Here, the taut skin seemed to stretch and sweat, almost glowing, as if exasperated of their own grip. For as I wandered the Great Dark, there was not but grey, barren rock as far as any eye could see. It did make a passerby out of an observer. I saw them trudge by, fingers dipped into their open mouths desperate for wetness, the lolled tongue. There, in the wood, I was the watcher, but here I am nothing but displacing air. Yet, within the smothering toil of my apathy, I had heard the bell. Murmur of God between their slick, bent fingers ruffled the hair on the back of my neck. My muscles groaned against the weight of the skin around them, aching to be set loose. All at once, I saw, from where I stood, there rose a great dome atop a hill on the horizon before me. Yes, I saw it there with mine own two eyes! The white exterior peered at me with flat orifices obscured through the mist, barely distinguishable from the dark sky behind it, as though all the world beyond the dome was cut from the same slab, only slightly effaced. The convex roof sat atop a disk, held up by great ionic pillars circling the temple. Steps radiated out and down the slope, like ripples in a pond escaping a dropped stone. It was greater than life, greater than the wood, greater than all else which filled this dark, and my gullible delight was that it was all mine. Yes, all mine! One could follow me to it but they could not follow me in. My hands stretched outwards with an audible cracking in the bone as I crept forward there. I could not tell you the rest. I would not even attempt, for it would change no-thing. To know if I did go completely naked into the theater of the divine. If I did need for no-thing, want for no-thing. If I was then full to the brim, cylindrical pull slid through my gaping jaw into my endless throat. If I saw it there, shimmering through the veil like pearlescent oil over crystal water. If it heard me singing with every atom that formed me, through every orifice and wound I had, polytonal in my begging for it to complete me with the fifth. If it looked into me, saw how I needed to know what God knows and to be with him. If it spoke back to me in flat dissonance, “how couldn’t ye?” It would be of no good to speak these things to you. In what way I was still returned to the ground, even if beneath it, intact with my puerile need to repeat my-self and my mistakes. Who would not climb the wall for a peer over the edge? The cautionary tale is the fool’s errand, and I am no fool. I am as my hands are; twisting in on themselves and bursting at the seams. I can-not contain the ache for sensation, just as I could not contain the grief as I fell, nor the agony as I crawled my way back to this rocky countryside, and lo! I am on my way there again now. I am, I am, I am! But I will not tell you the visceral details, as you already know them. You all do.

It’s happening to every-body.