Soteriology//Saturnalia

“Art & religion, carnivals & saturnalia, dancing & listening to oratory—all these have served…as doors in the wall.” – Aldous Huxley, Doors of Perception 

“[Staffer’s in regards to the youth] must not introduce the concept of Jesus & his grace until the students have been sufficiently convinced of their own depravity and [have] been allowed to stew in that depravity.” – Young Life Youth Ministry’s Statement of Non-Negotiables 

“You feel the last bit of breath leaving their body. You’re looking into their eyes. A person in that situation is God.” – Ted Bundy

Remember Young Life, that         
			annoying group of young 
		intellectual sellouts who sort of
		praised a vague God as a way to inflate themselves &
	look down on you        from a theoretical elevation? 
			  I always 
did drugs, never was young 
	  & sometimes even birds would 
let wasps siege their nests 
				to avoid plights to come.

When I say “intellectual sellouts” I simply mean
they stopped thinking in order to project
their misdirected stasis         onto small-town metal-heads or
	   people who slit appendages (I mean the ones
		       mutilating in private     
I mean people like me        not the pushy showoff emo kids
		 sharing scissor blades & tonguing each other’s maudlin 
	   blood in that algebra
		 for idiots class I could barely
	   not get kicked out of

	   remember That thine alms may be
							 in secret God’s Matthew 4:6 &
Blessed are the destroyers of false hope
			 for they are the true Messiahs Lavey’s Satanic Bible
& lest we forget
 One of the most important ways 
	    we socialize our children 
					is by 
	   making them feel       ashamed 
Ted Kacyznski, The Unabomber’s Manifesto
			so if you hate yourself like the rest of us
do so proudly & in solitude)          thus sending the wayward further on their way.

I read Pynchon with the same face I wear
when getting head:        bemused detachment
			& some meager ponderings about conspiracy theories
				   that only effect individuals with knowledge of them, 
though I read Proust with the same face I wear
	   when giving head:    impatience & longsuffering for that lauded 
delayed gratification,         similar to what the jail Chaplain said 
		       to hunger for           
	    upon my release. 

Starvation, oh this malnourishment throbs for a yesterday known easier,
                       not better but something like levitation:
                this the hunger I cannot tolerate 
will not tolerate         pursuing an illusion of assurance.

All of this impossible postulating         highfalutin circumnavigation
	  obscuring anything wrong I can        actually change. 
       Flowers for a cigarette,
	   raise the obelisk where the carcass was:
from Gethsemane to my codeine dealer’s apartment project
			self-flagellation, a robe of thorns, a crown of smoldering rosemary. 
        All of us the damned & the dead,
acquire an attitude for being wronged & wronging
				   & allow yourself some morsels of suffering—
			this is a long game we’ve found ourselves playing.