Take Neither Cloak Nor Staff

It takes a manner of a sweetness laboring each day to build a faith forsaking complex structures, knowing there's a paradise afoot ...a stubborn joy that clings like sand to those retreating from the beach. That serendipitous refreshment from fatigue comes when forgotten love speaks out behind the shining other world out there that looms in some tendentious ecstasy. It takes a holy book, ah, does it not? A yellowed, well-thumbed document to hold beneath the spotlight— add a mellow-voiced evangelist who holds beneath contempt an anti-perspirant or yet a scholar's honest sweat; it takes a book upheld from mesmery. A bit of holy trickery is all it takes. Saints turned out like sausages, with sandals worn so thin that they must shake the dust from off itinerant feet, ooze forth salvation as they can, yet praise the Lord, the blessings flow more sluggishly this year, the price of widows' mites more dear. And was it Satan who lived on to fall another day? ~