Hearing...

Faith cometh through hearing...

Listen...
It comes to me, that bastard notion, in the midst of ructions,
Making known to me, him and his like, he knows himself as not of his like,
Firmly erect to his horizontal,playing with his pipes, a seemingly insubstantial stimulation, in the ear,
His very own noise is excessively everywhere, the quiet man next door, the man of incapacitated logos, the lost word is his,
In silent setting, from the first low light of day to the descending dusk, is his exported resonance,
Imported engine-ear poised not to hear, the scooter brain, nostrils flared and flooded, responsive to the overpowering smell of his own fuel, the fool of foolishness and unfulfillment,
External combustion echoing from internal frustration and turmoil, the bad mad medley of revving the beast in his yard, it trembles before him,
In the chaotic walled space, that sort of place, yes, like air forced through the trembling flabby buttocks,
There he weaves it, there he leaves it - when not tuning up his fiery red-head, after dusk, or in midnight madness, his fancy fiancé, stranded, he nightly igniting her to pleading cries,
‘Tis music to his hidden ears, his own displeasure pleases him, his worst fear begets his monstrous ire, and drains his mad passion into her,
Let him who hath an hidden ear not hear!! Lugs live under his long yellowing white mane, cascading greasy strands, grease and gravity,
Sprouting outwards, dangling downwards, on all but the top, a coup d’etat for desolation, a critical segment of displaced growth,
A skating rink for Ginger’s fingers, sweeping them in revolutionary movement, hypnotic heavenly transport for his eyes,
So, I get a bit "edgy" at times, I need the sobering effect of strong wine, then I hear,
I just want a quiet life, his noises have no quietness about them, sounds of the synthetic sort, without essential belonging, they seek ownership in the unhidden ear.

There is...

There is the there
the just there
And, there is the there as
The there as something

To be just there
Bare of outward impact
With nothing to share
A mere fact

To be there as
Is a power to share
The inner with the outer
A virtuous snare

Undertaking...

Draw me up to the graveyard mother, to know your sodden soiled mound,
To touch your cold and heavy heart of solemn stone, solidly silent in its sound,
Father me mother with punishing hand, pain to know I am not alone,
Grant me a bothering brother mother, with awfulness in his eye of still night,
To face the fearful demonic dread to come, and launch the cursing kill-cry,
And an unapproachable sister who knows my evil seed, wild in deed, of me I deny,
Marry me majestic mother, spread yourself and suffer me a persevering child,
Tarry with me ‘til I take flight, then feed me well into the good ground mother,
Atoning finally with heavy stone, and sealed to the exclusion of all living light.

Hush...

Tip toe softly through the rape field, the seedy soiled patch of sprouting want,
Take care where feelers find you, and take you, in the swaying sphere of touch,
You’ll be whispered the brazen invitation, temptation with sluggish lustful lips,
Plucked with nimble hand, marked with jaundiced eye, urgently anointed,
Unction of sinful muddied drool that blinds, that seeks like Christ to make you see.

You’ll think what your boastful body will demand you to be, an accord of eloquent evil,
Don’t act the fool, be silent in the way you express yourself here, in fear of fear itself,
Hush here! Find utterance only in a look, don’t breathe a word, in voiceless defiance,
You’ll not shake the savage province with the commonplace, with contrary science
Behold! Bound now through the rape field, to the edge of no sense nonsense, and ease.

Presently...

Presently…not quite now, in due course, approximately, you’ll know the moment, it never comes,
In the entry it comes…between high sentried houses, exiting a low rear doorway, in standard shadow,
Greet the leering little suckling, to its face within the cherished pram, high hooded from the wind,
Wheeled on puddled concrete worldward in solicitation of shifty adulterous uncle Sam, the shaman,
Divining all ahead in silent inward judgement the slipless field in distant view, in fear of focused face,
Hey pushy well meaning mother, don’t play mind games, said the child’s enigmatic dewed eye,
Uncle Sam has a mind overflowing with next step notions, motioning to within the view,
The quick step, leading, a step ahead, bounding gracefully to a trot, the talent of all but a few,
Baby knowing notions is not daunted says, truly I’ll not always be mild and meek,
Something Sam cannot abide is riled infant cheek, so loins he lays bare and takes a lengthy leak,
Hey bud, says baby…spurred on by baptismal spray, this bloom will grow and have its day,
You’re a mere bud now babe, says Sam, a sapling, rooted, an abstract slice of life, not the whole deal,
There is only one place for you, a lowly skitter, under my instep lifter stiletto heel.

Not...

Out of the dark spot, when he shot the man he aimed to shoot,
The shooter swore the man lying there was not man he shot,
It was a shadow, he said, of the man that I had in mind,
A shadow without a doubt, of the man he was thought to be.

Out of the shadows echoed a shout not unlike a kind of a shot,
A cry transformed in the obscuring depths into an unmoving innocence,
That the deafening darkness nor the shot could not appropriately conceal,
Resembling the voice of the man it was essentially not.

Indeed, though he had heard it not, not in the way of the voice he knew,
He could tell it was not that of the man he knew he aimed to shoot,
So, out there, beyond lightness, appearing to his receiving standing stare,
Lies revealed the existing body of the man he did not execute.

Is it him? Is it him? came their shout out from the darkest spot,
Was that truly him you shot, was that really the shout of him you shot?
It was too dark to tell, and when he fell, and he did shout upon my shot,
It looked like the fall of him and the voice of him, but truly it was not.

He...

Delicately he is installed on the promontory, precarious pedestal of promise,
Where all have been placed before, the tantalised elect,
Urged on by captive, ever wanting will, stiff-necked and erect,
He obeys the consuming command to embrace not-him for himself.

Firmly fixed gaze on the immanent redemptive judgement,
An encounter with the distant consequences of an evil act, an error,
Out there, to come through hoary haze always just out of reach,
Threat beyond the breach, hell, in a mist of demonic difference.

Same as all differences, the very same, multiplicity of pitiless striving,
Overwhelming uttering only on the inside, confiding,
Imparting a revelation without words, to the highest instrument,
Graciously in the age of the burdensome breath.

Listen closely how it maintains all life breath, as one breath,
And as many in a dreadful condemned line, even beyond death,
If he stays on his cleftless rock, it may not make an approach,
May not encroach to this faultless firmament which holds him firm.

He, stiff necked and erect on the lookout for the painless state beyond,
He, on this his island of no dimensions, has no tendency to transit,
No heading here to kindle passion, no heading there in steps to suffering,
Save in thought alone, he reclaims himself redeemed, in still clear contemplation...just…

...or unjust?

Waiting for Acceptance...

Old man in the upper room, up an ageing root,
Old man en route to distant glory,
In his cot not of straw he curls for warmth,
An issue of the elemental, eternal foetus form, unborn.

His cold hands nestle in the nest of testicles,
He thinks of his full chamber pot below,
Hot piss within - too cold to stand a piss below,
On those feet that prognosticate the weather.

Possessed he is by those idle stand-ins,
Idols hard at it on elevated stage,
Divine dildos, inserts for the righteous sinner,
Fucking the old man mind to senseless separation.

There he is, no more waiting, old man dying,
In the upper room, up an ageing root,
Full of warm piss and rolled up like a fag,
Through the skylight in the roof, he meekly takes his leave.

What remains...?

What remains…?
What remains!
In the healthy striving mind,
In the endeavouring heathen heart,
Dealt a death blow,
Delivered with a stone to the ear,
Stone deaf to the beat,
That ear to the ground,
The millstone placed upon the neck,
The weighty purpose to dethrone.
What then remains?
Remains to be said...

The unruly habit...

As a rule
I never get into a habit,
A rabbit as a habit
Never gets into a rule.
Yet, the fool says,
That the rabbit in a habit
Is as me - the very same
Playing the very same game.

The Closing of an I...

From a certain aspect,
An end is in view.
I lie at the mercy of fortune,
I say I, but I lie,
Insofar as I remain,
It is not I, Why not I?
Infirmed by unsteady mind,
I am to be overcome,
A kind of work not of my own,
Yet my own cause,
A primary blunder of desire,
The necessity of a deficient nature.
Where do I go?
To where goes the I?
The I opens to pure passion,
And closes to every thing without,
Without knowing in any true fashion,
Possessed only of its very own doubt.

Communion...

Drink ye all of it,
Ye all from timeless cup,
Romance the pouting lips,
Treat the trembling tongue.

Substantial adulterated mingling,
In salivating cavity confined,
Crucified coctail in emptied heads,
Swooning, swirling, gathering, unrefined,

Spinning out the spritual energy,
Shaking out the inner demon,
In sweaty budding beads,
Sucking in the breath of God

This union of quivering saints,
Heads and hands heaven bound,
Unbound dancing body giving forth,
Life entire to unseen ground.

The F(l)ight...

Unfurl yourself for the fight. Take care of him like you’ve never taken care of someone before. Separate him from his holiness and the relics of religion. Open him up to a vision of heaven that will out of bounds to him. He is indeed bound. By his ignorance. If he begs for mercy, say one thing, that begging should not be in his nature. If he swears to you see it as a tear in his torso, a tear in his eye. Know what his eye says to you. Tend to the job. Remember, there is only you and him and death. And the moment that leads to death.

I see the look in his eye and know exactly what he means. It’s the eye with the light in it. He laughs until he nearly splits his gut. What’s funny? Nothin’ he says. Then I know. It's in his eye. No word of a lie. A sty in his lying eye, a puss filled pig sty.


Nothing stays the same. Nothing stays the same. Nothing stays the same…
He’s hallucinating. Calm him…
You’re looking at me, stop looking at me. I have no smile to give you.

What the fuck are you lookin’ at fucker? That harangue does not fit into the joy of all joys but is part of life. Bad fit. Hitchins was his name. Gerry Hitchins occupied the body of Hitchins and the road he was on he thought was his. He wandered it from dawn to dusk. Patrolling. Should be in a fucking madhouse. He has fits they say. He does not fit the bill that’s for sure. But,I’d visit him there and needle him to a fit. Good fit. Fits with his worldly essence. That I would visit him in such place inspired in me the idea that it was a courageous act to do such a thing. Mad people were to be feared and anyone daring to mingle with them must be full of fortitude. Or madness. An old friend of mine said it would be mad and not brave, even to go near a place like that. Our local madhouse was up the Ormeau Road hill, keep going, keep going, keep going, until you go mad. It was that sort of a road.


A full five minutes had elapsed since his body had limply slumped to the floor. Like a dropped curtain snipped from its rail. Dizziness was the dominant disposition. He had taken a hard blow to the chin at some point, a fist or a head butt, after which his mind could not conceive the presence of his body. He was informed that he was rising and not falling. Where exactly was he? There was no idea that he occupied a place. Until the earth and he were united.

He lay on his side on the ground being repeatedly kicked and punched. He curled up tighter after every boot and fist and made not a sound. With every second that passed the attack became more brutal, the attacker more furious in his intention to finish the job. But when the aggressor saw the victim smiling blindly up at him he entered into a madness that fuelled an even more frenzied assault. A final offensive of booting and punching. He swung the boot from further back and didn’t pull a punch when he bent over and closed in.

He growled and heaved with a new energy but the smile did not recede, in fact it extended its display as though the smiler was listening to some sweet music, or was being received into paradise. Accompanying his smile were his tightly shut eyes, shutting out the observable world and suggesting a dream state, a dream of pure absence of pain.

But no dream state existed behind the smile. The sacrificial offering feels the all the pain, feels every nerve that was offended. It’s good to feel the time pass slowly, the acute youthful senses. In his fallen state, in his vulnerability, in his blindness he thinks that he is the eye that sees a light that will reveal his strength. He sees his tormentor as one with him. The feet and fists enter into him. He is the same and he is different. He tortures but he is tortured. Every contact is a discovery of this fact. This insight. This intuition. The whole world is one. In its conflict it is one, but conflict requires another that is not identical with itself.

The body hurts, the body screams out an unheard plea to the source of its distress. And within the smiling face, and behind the closed eyes, in the darkness, is the thought that the body obeys its nature, and by doing so commands itself. I am not free it says, therefore I am free, at liberty to take my leave. The pursuit of illumination is only rewarded the further he advances into darkness. The pursuit of pleasure in the pain. The pursuit of freedom in necessity. The final blow is the moment when all comes to be what it is. We become what we are. The way is clear. The attacker didn’t know what hit him. It came from below and with unbelievable force. A paralysing offensive. With apparently little effort the victim unravelled himself from his curled disposition, and was off the floor and standing solidly on his two feet. He set about his opponent with a fierce and co-ordinated attack, seemingly unaffected by the punishment he had taken so passively. Is this real, how is this possible? Unconsciousness awaited. Or a consciousness of a new world. A new way. In the bright eyes of his assailant beamed the message of hopelessness. Pure act prevailed. It ripped open an inadequate guard and exposed the inconceivable. A revelation. A boundary is reached. He is taking flight.

esse qua esse bonum est...

esse qua esse bonum est
Unambiguous, unconditional,
Rescued from matter,
In this mind,
In this body confined,
Kissed by the creative form,
Loved in uniqueness,
By self and not-self,
In our lonely tower,
Conatus all are we,
Endeavoured perseverence
Essence, virtue, power,
The good being is what it is.

Godly Union...

She sways me this way and that
The whence of my passion
Identical loss, identical gain
Confounding self love.

Moulded by her spirit
In fitting harmony
In naked mutilating truth
Interdependent, essentially prejudiced.

No Godly union this
No amor intellectualis
It languishes inadequately in deep darkness
Bounded, grounded at the rungless ladder base

Random pleasure abounds
Brimming with remote distortions
No inkling, no vision of signs
Fruitless in its eternal reward

Getting it...

He uproots a stubborn tree,
Then stops, stoops,
And looks up at me,
Straight in the face
I follow his stare,
An eye for an eye,
Neither say not a word,
It seems absurd,
But I get it,
And so does he.

Body Awareness...

Enclosed in length
And breadth
And depth
Bound to when, before, now, after
Thought touching body
Body confined in mind
Connected perfectly
Reflected matchlessly
Finitely felt
Conceived as consequence
In motion and rest
Where there is one
There is the other
In idea, in body
Pointing ever outwards
Ever onwards
Ever upwards
Ever, ever, ever more,
So, lets not think
That this is all there is -
Bend to still necessity

Sinful Caring...

Trapped in the way I see,
Trapped in the way I be,
I be is I see mapped,
So - let me be, as if thou were me,
In unfree - intentionality...
To tend, to attend,
To the pretension of self mastery,
A law unto oneself,
An evil unto others.

Daftness Abounding: Loser of the 2008 Michael McLaverty Short Story Award

“For I do not do the good I desire, but rather the evil I do not desire.”
St Paul.


The lad Malone asks for sense, but gets daftness. Nonsense in a positivistic sort of way. Dialectical daftness from mother Mullarky. The holy mother. The holy other mother. She is fly yet she attributes flyness to me. She is light and her flight soars, mine has the benefit of a safety net. Flyness is a different type of sense, and when I ask simply for sense it is that nonsense that I get. It’s senseless Sunday again. The sense is the sense of holiness. Sense with a hole in it into which daftness disappears. That's as far as I get with it sometimes.
Can I go out to play with Terence? A simple proposition.
It’s a Sunday. Never mind Terence. That’s unwarranted. Going too far.
But he’s at the door. Malone goes further.
I don’t care if he is at heaven’s door!! Formidably nonsensical.
But he is out kicking the ball on his own. Desperate.
Terence is a Catholic boy. Bigoted.
Just at the back door. Begging.
That still counts as playing. Clever.
What if I play in my head? Cleverer.
God will know. Clevererer

Can we watch the TV then? Can I take my suit clothes off? It all itches. Pleading.
It’s a Sunday. No work, no play. And it’s church soon. Unflinching. Lamentational.

What about no itching? No enjoyment. Cheek.
Jesus, the fiery furnace face on it for holiness’s sake!

Daft? Terence’s Catholic mind can’t make sense of it. I make him see the sense in the daftness of it, but without losing the daftness itself. Terence never lost his daftness for as long as I knew him. He was an inspired diviner of daftness.
Life is daft and being daft in conformity with it is not as daft as it seems. Not indispensable to a contented life or anything as essential as that, but he that doeth daftness and thinketh daftness is acting and thinking meaningfully. The whole business of daftness is paradoxical. Living it means not knowing it as you’re being daft, but also knowing it, depending on what you mean by knowing. And that is the paradox of knowing. Knowing technically doesn’t know it at all, only knowing intuitively does, but you’ll not hear a word of credit for that in the streets or the minds of folk, as there are no words that go along with knowing intuitively. Only a silence.

I am now a silent outcast and I will myself from the deep willing well within with my failing spirit, back to the days of daftness in Belfast, trying to re-engage with the particular joy of it, for I never feel far from the source of it. Nor, it is said within, are we far from the powerful will to daftness and the manifestation of the mutual daftness of others about you - like Terence - who are infected equally with it and provide the dialectic of daftness through which new intoxicated heights are regularly reached.

But the separation from it was undeniable, and I was seizing up in its absence. There was a cold draught of estrangement alright without it. Arthritic sensible ideas marched me down the road to despair. Not a frivolous furrow. One appropriate thought, one adequate idea, one massive intuition, might halt the decline.
I spy me, mocking and mocked Malone Mullarky, who was probably at the peak of his own powers of daftness around the age of 15 or 16, though the contribution of early age daftness shouldn’t be dismissed as insignificant.

Belfast as I recall it was awash with daftness and I was flushed into it on a full high tide in the particularly mad era of the 1950s and 1960s when everyone seemed to be looking for organised forms of daftness to belong to. Daftness uncovered itself. Individual daftness was hard to separate from simple lunacy, bereft as it was of a common language. A group made it respectable, where the language of a particular daftness, shared among others, made it almost sensible. So, with such unconcealed daftness it was open season for ridicule and mockery, the twin pillars of personal preservation in such crazy circumstances.

But, not all daftness is the same. There is the mad, raging daftness that can kill, and that which can kill you with laughter. There is also the distinction of daftness and daftness transcended. Like there is the idea of God and the idea of God transcended, the latter being the knowing encounter with the Godlessness of God. There are those who are totally daft but think they are above daftness, and this is the daftness that real daftness transcended loves, for it encounters the essence of it.

Knowing daftness is a decent form of knowing alright, though it requires something of a spirit of the interpretation of daftness. And I hasten to add, something of a new language to think it. Intuition is the key to it. Of the Spinozistic kind. Being daft at the end requires that it is there at the start. It’s like understanding holiness, it requires a predisposition to holiness itself. Indeed holiness and daftness have a lot in common. The daftest places, the daftest people that populated them, were those designed and disposed to the holy, but the efforts of the designers and disposers to mingle the holy with the mundane - the latter they in fact confused with the former - made daftness truly manifest in the church. The Church of Divine Daftness.

The Mullarky parents embrace Protestant Pentecostalism in spite of being adequately brainwashed into Belfast Catholicism. The Mullarky children follow suit dressed suitably, suits made from tiny little bits of cloth in the tailor’s shop. One second we were all holy up to our fully Fenian eyeballs and the next instant we were justified by faith evangelising Loyalists. What in the name of God happened there, here of all places? In the name of God it truly was. Jahweh, the Lord of duration led them, and they endured to testify as prize exhibits up and down the Province as to how that dramatic little about turn came to be. A personal head to head with the Godhead no less, from whom the conviction was made irresistible. Irresistible grace. Grace abounding in the flesh, abounding greater than the abounding bounding of separating sin, providential, thrusting its unifying self upon them, dimming their intellects and brightening their dark imaginings and closing the infinite distance that is the self with itself in sinfulness.

By some extraordinary means it was imparted to them that Catholicism was really the Devil’s attempt to be God through ridiculous and meaningless little rites and rituals, silly statues and never ending private and public penitence. In fact, all that was really necessary all along to possess God, was the singular wee act of faith. A minimal event in its own minimal time. A yes thought Hardly enough you’d think. Just a thought, not even a second long. The parents heard a such a short, still small voice they said. Catholics said that they had heard a voice too and knew of faith, and indeed practised faith, but Protestants laughed at that claim with all their laughing power. Odd, the certainty of them all, as if faith did not necessitate doubt, but none had a doubt in the world.

The experience of salvation was embroidered by the primitive Mullarky mind – slightly more sophisticated than cave painting - with references to all sorts of miraculous appearances and events. The picture was this. The Lord saw to it that unpaid bills were settled and incurable illnesses healed. God gave them peace beyond all understanding that was never there beforehand, even with understanding. He even got the father Mullarky a promotion in his workplace.

All credit was given to the living God over the dead God.. Praise the living Lord!! shouted the believers when they heard of these wonders, and the Mullarkys responded in kind, by creating new recipes for Godly adoration for the faithful to feast upon at the Lord’s table. In the beginning was the Word and as faith comes by hearing the word, the Mullarky word, with which they conjured up curious expressions of their own holy dispensation, was heard loud and clear by many a deaf ear. Deaf ears were daft.

Before true salvation all we had was slavation, was a father Mullarky original, and no longer are we slaves to the rotten regime of Christless ritual. The confession box, they said, was no better than the boxes of prizes in Take Your Pick, and that the Catholic religion itself was like getting the booby prize.
All that stuff had the believers in a Godly frenzy with laughter attenuating their sense of saintly superiority over the host of sinful saints across the divide. So, they told their queer story here there and everywhere, in small places and large, and the Lord was praised excessively with small voices and big voices, for his was power to transform voices and people from the guttermost to the uttermost. Out of Catholicism was out of the most guttermost.

The family soon settled into a little Pentecostal church in the Belfast suburbs, and that place there was as mad as religion could get. But how we lavished our love on it, in so far as love is joy accompanied by an adequate conception of its cause. And we thought of the cause and joy in the evangelical was a special sort of joy. On the way we passed Stormont and marvelled at the elegance of it without ever thinking of the mad goings on therein.

Yet, I was the least effected by the peculiar goings on all around me. My brother and two sisters, entered into an unhindered participation with all the established spiritual headcases. My borderline conversion had been due to immaturity. I was considerably younger than the others and the comic nature of it all made the effort to go to the meetings five times a week almost worth the pain of pretending to take it seriously. There was in me however, a genuine desire to see the incredible sights of miracles and wonders that was the promise of Pentecostalism. Something within wanted me to enjoy both God and the mysterious mammon, and something equally powerful within said not to.

But to that utterly unctuous manipulatory mutterer of a spiritual spoilsport within, I begged, in the privacy of my mind, to differ, though it wasn’t at all real begging, just being powerfully disposed to differ. I could see well enough that I was getting on quite successfully with the life of old and the life anew, nothing bad was happening, but I was being battered week in week out by the words in searing sermons that seemed to dwell with unnecessarily extended duration on the evil of this sort of dualistic lifestyle. There were moments when it was funny and moments when it was not, but I was swiftly getting completely browned off with it, as if every word of condemnation was meant for me.

The Pastor in his soaking wet white shirt directed his inspired anger all over us and we felt it upon us in powerful shouted showers of frothy baptismal spit. Why was he angry? He leaped off his raised platform in a heightened state of spiritual excitement, and was in amongst us like a grouse beater beating out the hidden birds from their secure nests. His holy bloated bastard of a face represented the wrath of God and his searchlight eyeballs seemed to shine on shifty sitting sinners. But then the big word, BACKSLIDER, entered the vocabulary and in response to it, all my impulses to daftness seemed to dry up.

The backslider was a deceiver, and the preacher poured out his venom on those deceivers in the midst of believers. He rhymed and rhymed the notion of a deceiver believer until the faithful, flush with holy hate, chanted their loving lyric.

Deceiver believer
Burn in Hell
Thou Saviour knows thee well
And will not be thy receiver

The backsliders are actors, says the Pastor, the most evil actors as they are playing a part for the devil whilst seeking the comfort of God. But God knows them as well as he knows his own. And do you know what else they are, he says, they are hypocrites. A hypocrite is an actor too, for he wants all about him to believe him to be what he is not. A backslider is a Christian hypocrite.

Hypocrite is a Greek word, he says, it means play acting, but, he shouts scaringly, you don’t play act with God. Job says the hypocrite means a Godless soul! And Jesus himself condemns it. He laughed, but it was a mystifying laugh, and nobody else laughed as laughing by the Pastor didn’t always indicate that a matter was funny. He occasionally turned on someone who laughed at something he laughed at but that was not funny, his laughing face transformed into rage. So, with this particular theological diversion, the convened remained in an uneasy silence.
I, however, knew immediately that it wasn’t funny. I took it to heart and mind and it began to change my heart and mind into serious things which was not a terribly pleasant development in a mind that leaned towards frivolity. Being a deceiver believer didn’t suit me, I thought. A hypocrite sounded worse to my own ears when said with my own voice. I said it over and over again to myself and it never got any better.

Did I have a will to deception? The whole idea of the backslider caused me to look inside myself to find what my intentions were for every act that I did. Then I had to find the overall intention toward life itself. What essentially drove me to be who I was?

At times the burning backslider concept grilled me all sides. Other times I felt haughtily confident in my betraying ways, yet the notion that, BEHOLD! Your sins will find you out, was never far away. Was I the servant of Satan? It didn’t feel like it.

I prayed like the devil for infantile spiritual sanity but prayer was the biggest joke of all. Through my prayers I had unclean lips as my words had only temporary sincerity. They needed hot coals placed upon them by the Lord’s Seraphims to purge them. So said the Pastor as he cupped his mitt for us to see the invisible burning coal. And the daft saw it without its invisibility. He claimed the status of prophet, a holy man linked inextricably to his people, and told us that he had had his very own lips purified by fire, just like the prophet Isaiah himself.
Praying in the Pentecostal church was the daftest thing I had ever witnessed right up to the end of my daft days. And the people who prayed, whether in pure or planned spontaneity, turned the scene into nothing less than a vaudeville show and more entertaining than Sunday Night at the London Palladium. Singers, testifiers, dancers, babblers in strange tongues. There was an old ex-boxer guy who sparred up and down the aisle punch drunk in the spirit. Some laughed at him in the spirit and some were embarrassed in the spirit. The elders looked concerned in the spirit. He would eventually reach a summit of excitement that would tip him over into some African tribal-like babble and on occasion a group of elders would – with as much dignity as possible - head him off and bundle him into a vestry.

There was healing of the infirmed, the casting out of demons (which involved the fierce manipulation and messing up of neat Sunday-go-to-meeting hairstyles), and the wholly undignified sight of those baptised by total immersion. Out they came from a big bath coughing and spluttering the name of Jesus. Sounded like cursing. The weightier ones were difficult to lift out of submersion and when they eventually came out, it was with giant gasps and the wheezing of that name above all names. Everyone laughed and praised God in a great nervousness. How troublesome it would be for someone to drown on one of these occasions but I secretly prayed for the day.

In fact I prayed and prayed and got lost in private praying. Then I listened to the prayers of others and then wondered what prayer really was. Surely not to be found in the crazy babblings of these believers? Those of the usual suspect suspects and the unusual suspects, who stood up at every supposed divine calling, and those chosen at random who trembled as they spoke. Those devotions revealed more about the individual than about God.
There was the short trembling panic prayer, the mad shouting prayer, the long-winded prayer, the timid, almost inaudible prayer, the heavily detailed descriptive variety of prayer, the linguistically frustrated prayer seeking and not finding the required elevated words of praise and having to suffice with the stuttered comical commonplace substitutes. Halting abruptly before the precipice of their linguistic limitations, I thought in my blacked out seated praying position, what they really wanted to say was, Jesus Christ you are some fucking Lord. What a cunt fount of holiness you are! Nevertheless, nervous or assured, their confidence in their conviction condemned them to spiritual darkness.

What resolved the matter for me was my divination of this spiritual darkness of daftness untranscended. From top to bottom, inside out, it was blind daftness. It came to me in much the same way as the parents’ conversion, in an incredible instant. Theirs was in response to reading a little pink evangelical tract that was shoved through their letterbox. An internal intuition shoved to the fore of my attention convinced me. And then I saw a new heaven and a new earth and a new hell, and returned for a time to the freedom of daftness transcended.

This freedom allowed me to see those demons of daftness, the most powerful of which convinced these people that they possessed God. They thought He was so small that they had him in their lives and in their church, in their very own daft experience, and even had Him at their beck and call. Just as the Catholics thought they had him in statues and paintings and in the ritual experience. What they actually had was idolatry. Possessing God makes it just as easy to dispose of Him. God is not to be possessed nor disposed of.

That’s not what the Bible says of God, that is not what the idea of God itself insists. The idea and the text reveal that we must wait for him and that we cannot have Him. And as they, the dafties, did not know God, or that they had to wait for him, always in uncertainty, they knew neither abounding sin nor the more abounding grace, just abounding daftness.

So, I reveled in their submission to daftness, despite their defiance.
They still shout and scream.

God and I meet in still silence and I wonder, is he there? Or is he in a huff? Let’s wait and see. Waiting is what he's good at.

Being alone...

Into fancy,
Inevitably,
Intuitively,
Preliminary to action,
It just kills me to think,
That there is always someone there,
Who is not me....that I cannot see,
...and all that this means.

Displaced,held in this place,
This place,this time,
Sight succumbing to half light,
Unsited, sited to blindness,
Confined to the not to know,
Lumbering, in My very own noble loins.