Holy, Holy

We made our house into a church and lay on deep carpets admiring the gods in the ceiling cracks
and lit candles in the kitchen, singing loudly for salvation over the phone to gone friends and dying mothers.
We made murals with old paint, getting sick off the fumes, got classic rock radio coming in static over a secondhand boombox
and prayed feverishly to the bugs in our sugar, the leak in our roof, the infection in our gums.
We baptized ourselves in the bathtub, yelling over the thunder about the danger we were in,
yelling new commandments into a tape recorder until the batteries died
and fed each other snack food with our eyes closed, opening gas station wine bottles with the key to your Chevy Lumina, shit chardonnay staining our teeth.
We stared deeply into the oven for a sign until our heads were heavy with gas, dumb with visions of sex and saviors
and broke every window on the second floor for lack of stained glass, letting theleaves pile up, burning them for boredom.
We punched ourselves awake to observe the equinox, great stretches of bitter October night on the roof watching traffic,
watching the sky for new light
and weighed ourselves next to the television, thinking about the anchorwoman naked, counting our ribs.
We ran hands over each other in ritual, keeping warm under eaten afghan covers, sweat sticking to our sides
and urinated off of the fire escape as a gesture of our own holy, making a fuss over the trajectory of piss in relation to the changes in wind.
We went on pilgrimages to the corner store for sleeping pills and Reese’s cups, smiling high and tired at the woman buying five types of lottery tickets,
smiling for the way our feet were swollen inside our sneakers, stomped out too many ceremonies around the whistling furnace
and grew a beautiful beard just then, our faces sore from cheap razors and hailstorms on the way to the library, cutting out naked statue pictures from history books to put next to our sleeping heads
We spent a day in Manhattan looking for images of the messiah in Coca-Cola billboards, making eye contact with beautiful strangers in tracksuits,
making out in the back of taxis, taking pictures of each other next to monuments,
and reaching enlightenment.