Postman, the Spirit/Post-Man, the Spirit

or

Tell Little Jesus

or

"Yeah"

a man is praying
(or talking)
and his words are shuddering
(or he shudders)
and he's crouching down
in his closet
with his cotton shirts
naturally, all alone
(or with his cotton shirts)
and his soul is seeping
(or pulsing)
like driving rain
and his neighbor can hear
him crying
(or, he wonders, masturbating)
and he's listening
(or hearing)
these echoes in the closet
vibrate down the stopped up gutters
dripping over
gravel and yesterday's thinning mud
(or the oasis)
and the ants take the words
bit by bit
(or bite)
for the sake of the queen
(or god)
as she gives birth
to another heir
(or drone)
carried to the rounded hatchery
(or nursery)
and the words pass through the membrane
and wriggle up through tunnels
(or channels)
past bits of a moth carcass
(or a poet)
and they
return to their variance
as the wind whips up/
whips them up
(or pushes them away)
and above the [ruhf]/
the [rewf]/
the roof
the words looking down
upon the home
(or hovel)
where their speaker lives
(or hovels)
and they drift above the city
(or hive)
where everybody lives/loves him/hymn
where he works
and drives
and the words mix in with
carbon monoxide
and they join a stratus cloud
(or water...colony)
but only for a moment
as they're stripped
(or teased)
out of its grasp
and into the vast blue
where they shiver
(or shimmer)
and find their way into a thin
ionic soup
(or slurry)
jittering with living electrons
and AM DJ chatter
or "Alone Again, Naturally"
and the talk takes on the tinge
of aurora exhaling expressive exosphere
where down gets fuzzy
(or fizzy)
where atoms on queue
(or in queue)
for upwards
(or outwards)
and our words throw themselves downwards
but missing accelerate
from everything that's important
(or impotent)
to me
(or maybe not me
[or maybe not us])
soul in tow
jump and gyre
at increasing speeds
until they leave
(or are ejected)
to the frozen vacuum
where lukewarm spit boils
(or evaporates)
in a lost cosmonaut's mouth
and he had no words
to add
but the meaning/the moaning of
his voiceless groaning
latched on
(or gravitated) prayerward
forward
galactic northward
(or just away from this arm)
as the suns are consolidating
(or condensing)
toward the All-center
and they're ripping
and bending light
(or space-time)
into shreds we can't see
(or will be)
and the neutrinos stream past
and mingle with syllables
too far, far away
(or not close enough)
and they're carried
married enough
descending to splashing waves of plasma
(or forge)
(or forget)
the strings
(or projections of waiting data)
that resonate along
the length and breadth
of distance/of time
just wading/just waiting
encircling stairs
(or prayers)
the words compressing
under all of the weight/the wait
(or gravitas) of it all
pulling/tickling/tugging/the thrumming
of God
(or the galaxy) to whom we sing/singe
before jettisoning
the sybillant eruptions/ruptures
outward
(or everward/the everword)
matching the speed of the light-bending well
out
out
away

panting
sucking air
and rippling
(or dying)
with your words in the pool of black
in empty nothing ever
and the words
approach
the bell
of heaven
that matches the slack pitch of the pitch-black universe
carrying inside each syllable the humming yellow god of us all
and, oh, how they ring

grow cold

and we wait

for our answer

when a voice comes through the drywall
[tock, tock, tock]
"You alright, Man?"