Dayspring

by Anthony Oliveira

old men in their wisdom always know precisely how much the young should suffer

cruel hands ancient before time pulled the rock of eden from the earth like a tooth lifted it above the scudding scouring clouds and dropped it from a height within the sea an ungainly unholy asteroid an orbital bombardment to smite the stegosaur and flat the gulf to teach thee: that god attributes to place no sanctity to sentiment no countenance and show you this is how he treats his friends

don’t pray in public those that do have already got what they wanted out of it and it had nothing to do with god

can anything good come from nazareth? prophets are never welcome home

only in this do i have any sympathy: i know how horrible it is to have history notice you out of the corner of its eye let the clay steal the clay and the dead bury the dead

and they came to him and asked: if heaven’s so real then what happens if a woman marries seven times like if her husbands keep dying so she had seven husbands whose wife will she be in heaven? and he said: please do not ask me stupid fucking questions

the day will come when many will say: lord i prophesied and preached in your name! many devils have i tormented, and much wickedness have i cast out where is my reward and i will say: who are you? i never knew you as anything except an operative of cruelty your life served your own malice and not me at all

to know the world but not yourself is to know nothing at all

if even God can die then death is no indignity if even God can love then love can be no sin and if God so loved us loved me then beloved we ought also to love one another

this is not a place of honour no gods live here it is a dwelling place of corpses a reef of coralizing shipwreck faiths this is the tomb of empires boundless and bare why do you look for the living among the dead?

the people were watching us eat and they said to him: your followers are disgusting they do not wash their hands they defile their bodies with tattoos and mutilations with gorging and starving with drug and drink and he said: i want you to understand this because apparently it is still unclear to you: the body is never the index of sin aesthetics are never ethics and illness is never iniquity defilement is something you do not ingest thus he declared all things of the body clean

i feel like you think that just because you are god crammed into flesh that you get a pass for being just generally deeply weird as a person