I found my Philadelphia Jesus at a time when the church deemed my soul sick with the toxin of some meliorating evil. He appeared to me with a heart so frank I began to fear the ongoing deterioration the New Jesus yielded over the functions of my heart… for, as a pawn and devoted follower, I needed not only to deconstruct the passages of my Mother Faith to welcome a lover she told me to hold as she did me. My Philadelphia Jesus had hair so long you would have mistaken him as a prophet too, if you had met him where I met him. But desolation is a SEPTA station around about 2 P.M. on a Friday — and as a singer of deep Louisiana hymns, I knew that this sense of “fallow” was on par with a prospect far greater than the sickly betrayal I wrote in the other oblivion.
Picture me as the subject in Birthday by Dorothea Tanning: I was standing there, chest torn in the sublime air, waiting for a savior to tell me how to dream. Because I did not dream of the mythical nor the fantastical nor the sexual nor the pseudosexual nor the violent nor the happy nor the sorrowful nor the mellow, I dreamt none, saw no mirrors. Could have no riddance in the waking world, why would I find solace here where there is not even darkness to wallow in? Instead, as I prayed to thee that I remained still in my motions and bore the pain of my shattered nail beds that pragmatically bled when their ends were bitten too short. Here is how I prayed before the cross made me new again:
Dear Heavenly Father,
I bring to thee nothing but my naked body and heart. I know it won’t be enough, but I ask for thee to take me as I am.
Take me as I am.
Take me as I am.
Because, Father, if thou shall not, I will weep like thou did when I left the Mother, even though the tears were of a false idol — forged by the preachers with secrets withheld to everyone except me, the challenging unmatriach.
I have not known this reservoir, but thou hath turned it to gold. Yahwah, know I looked deep within, and found the ravine of my turmoil. Know I met thee and became reacquainted with the ruthless nature of my primitivity.
Amen.
In another prayer, thou told me that I was safe enough to look beyond thee and forget thee altogether. In that perplexion, I knew I had extrapolated the bygone prophecy of an equally bygone prophet. I could not depart from thee, my Philadelphia Jesus, because how could I leave the force that forged the realm of my dreams — which were once jaded with the technicolor of the more mundane and passive clique contained in my scorch of demons? Yet there are demons that ride on a much more implicative evil — the gray matter that poisons the mellow and condemns the archaic and the primitive, for where the Soul treks shall be no barrier to the New Jesus, who I felt in rhythms and conundrums that would make me realize that the directions of my morning prayers concave not to the directions of the heavens but within the roots of the earth adorned with the chapels of time present and time future; do not look for the Spire, my Soul, or Philadelphia will take you again and tell you nothing of the Revelation surging to the Circle.
Thou, with all of thy grace, appeared to me as fruitful but not holy and true. Where is the open door; where are the frights of my blessings, my Philadelphia Jesus? Why, along the Schuylkill, I can still speak to thee, feel thou as if thou were the lux of my very marrows… I no longer hold the key; thou never granted it to me. I see new gods with no jurisdictions as human as thine — for the breach of the aesthetic world diminishes itself in the clots of my heart with each passing day. Every morn is elastic in the clauses of forgetting thee, the Philadelphia Jesus who concurred with the physicality of the Mother Faith and disguised motive with glamor and cruelty with frankness. The themes of each dogma equate to the deterioration of the Soul, who finds the beauty in the “demise” of Eve by logically eliminating the phrase “demise” from the inventory of faith constructions altogether; how could “demise” be mended when the archetype of devotion has built its foundation the repression of pleasure in exchange for another’s turmoil?
My foundation once was firm but now it is fluid — the rivers have of course dried in the seasons of drought but now the weather is torrentially lunar; I foresee the Schuykill’s undead ripples as a prophetic finality that brews within me and not by the blood nor the body of an external savior. Less fatalistic, more divine: the river is quaintly splendorous and befriending me for the first time, and thy rine has become accustomed to the flesh and bodies of other false messiahs; celestially enough, thou shall feel god as the muse of the regressions of all common prophets of deceit, and I shall see the Soul as the intended muse of all of my love.
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