we are the holiest of objects.
we are the subjects of no ordinary church.
we have been subdued to our idol, lavish in green and wrapped in fibers optically imprinted upon the face.

we are the survivors of a long and incredible pilgrimage.


A sticky wind was cruising through the late air of the city. Jamilla embraced it, skipping slowly through the desolate streets. The roads were slick from new rain. Jamilla's eyes shot up to the iridescent full moon and her heart filled with the night.but the heat trapped from the day imprinted memory of the beaming sun and rhythmic fans harmonizing all over the blocks like a constant city hymn.
Jamilla was a joyous sight to see that night. A black girl dancing in the wet streets of the city night, wearing a gleeful smile; her red shortsleeve top clinging to her skin, set atop a pair of khaki shorts. Brown wet ringlets bounced back and forth, rocking with the steady skip of her bare feet.
It was the day after graduation, the dark end of the street. The hour after nye, the laughter to the Big Man’s joke, and all that which is epically wasted. And here Jamilla was careening through the black sands, giggling and crying out with joy as her naked feet dipped into the dark surface of the pothole ocean.
“We came from the deep sea.”
Somebody had whispered it once, but it had slipped off into the breeze, never caught until now, upon Jamillla’s unassuming ears.
Her figure, now stationed on the side of the street, leg rested atop the heavy bolt of a flaming red metal hydrant, was angled toward the glistening road.
It was a road of contradictions.
Jamilla peered as far as her vision would allow, until the burning world outside that thick glass wall, melting a civilization into soot, irritated her eyes.
Who could pretend it was better? And so it ended as it began: roaming gangs- rushing and ambushing nighttime visitors and robbing them of an innocence- trailing about some deserted den, under a naked sky which glimmered with the glitter of a distant dream. the only that could move you out of a time.
Only was as only is. And Jamilla was all alonely strumming some fantasy guitar and wished the window of eruptions was painted with gold. Off in a distance, Jamilla fumbled back down to her perch. Something by the black gate of a house nearby moved.
A shadow stepped up from the ground and murmured some indecipherable mutter.
It was only Ritt, come to see the graduation she prseumed. A glowing window above the black gate sat silently, spying.
“those two have their own little thing.”
Jamilla and Ritt, sat pretty atop a hydrant, talking about their own little things.
“there’s a war going on,” Jamilla said, trying to appease Ritt, for she couldn’t see them but tears were bursting out of Ritt, dropping spots of darkness beside the pavement.
It was where that road ended that another house stood scared.
the house has shattered and blown wild to the whirlwind. A huge bitch lived out back, an only child.
Jamilla had been like her once, but then she mustered up the courage to step out onto ther porch. And it was there, for days, that she waited, lights flooding her crumpled and cornered frame.
Only tonight did she creep off the three wooden steps and out onto the dark pavement, shaking.
“so you never really want to love someone, like they all do? you do not want to sacrifice any part of you for anything else? not even to say you have done it. to be able to say you experienced it, to live?” says the shadow.
“I do not need that to be happy. I am fully content and believe myself when I say sex puts you in a daze and you think you’re happy.”
“what if you really are happy? what is the difference between really happy and believing you are happy? it’s a dangerous question, but it is the truth that you so wish to attain. And it is here now, Ritt, that you see death can only exist in a world where people believe in it.”

a revolution of the mind. the complete death of a thing comes as your bird is pecking at the glass, awaiting your return.

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