The first Holy Book of The Word
In Nonsense we Trust
Assembled from pre-existing works by John Burroughs, Ryan P. Kinney, Jack McGuane, Cee Williams, Don Lee, Susan Grimm, Joe Roarty, Russ Vidrick, Dianne Boresnik, Mitch James, Tanya Pilumeli, Julie Ursem Marchand, Vicki Acquah, Terry Provost, Adam Brodsky, Lennart Lundh, Raymond McNiece, Hannah Williams, MaxWell Shell, Tim Richards, Ayla Atash, RC (Bob Wilson), Chuck Joy, Katie Daley, Solomon Dixon, Mary Weems, and Gordon Downie
Mostly taken as quotes during live poetry readings. Some stolen from other sources.
Additional content from predictive text by JM Romig, Linkin Park “Powerless,” “Saga of the Swamp Thing” vol. 1, T.S. Eliot, Amalgam Mythos, Kurt Vonnegut, Kevin Smith, and Psalms (chap.):13
Added original content by Ryan P. Kinney, Lennart Lundh, Barbara Marie Minney, and Gabriella Ercolani
“Lords Temple Basement Men,” it says on the door in a badly photocopied sign, replaced freshly each week. The original was built from torn up pieces of bootleg band vinyl stickers left plastered all over the windows of some teenager, surely passed into decaying adulthood long ago.
They gather in the bottom of an abandoned house in the heart of mostly warehouses. Something, someone long ago forgot to bull doze in the wake of morbid industrialization and the zeal to just get more men more jobs while giving them no life, no place to live. They built in their own obsolescence
A Man stands outside; half catcalling, half showman barker; daring, tempting, bribing people to worship with him. In paint stained torn jeans, long shaggy hair with the bald spot landing pad directly in the center of his head, and shoes barely hanging together on his feet, he bellows out The Word. Somewhere between slam poetry performance and theology lesson, he entices and seduces people to enter. Here, they do not call him Father, or Brother, just person: Man. “Hey, Man,” is how they great him.
“This is the original Church of the world's scraps.
The body of the body of the body.
Burning in the sun.
‘Me and my son were born in the sun,’ They say.
He is willing to do it.”
The Man says, in a soothing voice.
People enter a crooked doorway. The Man pulls the peeling door behind them, scrapping the ground as he does so, and leads his flock down the concrete stairs to the basement. They come to a dingy dirt gravel floor and spread out; filling the space like gas expanding into a cylinder.
Background chatter already fills the room with low whispers before the performance-service,
“I am happy to hear that you are safe”.
“I am not sure that you are”
“You will be missed.”
The Man steps upon his usual milk crate to open the service. He intones the Capitalist Mantra,
“God Save the Queen
Long live the King
Hail to the Chief
The Lord of all Lies”
And the people chant, “I will not kiss you. I will not bow. I will not bow. I will not be moved.
I love the idea of what I have to be”
Mama Evil steps forward to explain their purpose here,
“This is a strange, mad religious service. Everything is out of place, nothing and no one seems to fit together. We all gather here, but no one seems to-gether. This is less a sermon and more a discussion where the gospel is debated. The Word is critiqued, modified, disputed, and changes between its members at each meeting. At any time for no reason, people can interrupt The Man to deny, confirm, suggest, or challenge his statements. The group then decides on the next bit of gospel to be made up on the spot or if what has already been said is still the current phase of perspective. There is no central thought or plan, just a plan for thoughts. We, people, call this Faith. Our membership makes up a multitude. There are Baptists, Catholics, Jews, Muslims, Agnostics, Atheists, Satanists, Buddhists, Capitalists, hippies, goth kids, Starbuck’s sipping bloggers, just plain weird kids in the back working on their latest D&D campaign. We are just people. And he, is just a Man. The only interconnecting philosophy among us is, ‘Anything is possible at any time for any reason.’”
“As the recovering Catholic Kevin Smith wrote, ‘It’s not important which faith you are, just that you have faith.’”
The People are ready to receive The Holy Spirit and his unique brand of performance poetry,
“In the beginning, there was only The Word, a word. And then more. Which were collected into a story; The Story. And from The Story came creation.
And then came the questions. And The Question was man. Who are we? What are we? Why? Who am I?”
The Man explains,
“The whole point of The Word is to make up new ones. To defy God’s Word by creating ourselves.”
“Do you see the animal’s asking questions? Wondering who they are. They simply know that they are.
There are no fish in Purgatory. Only us.
The Garden of Eden is colonized by serpents
There was no place for the demons to go, but further in.”
A Hindu Yoga instructor rights himself from walking on his hands and decides to take the first initiative, “Puff the Magic Dragon says, ‘Jesus loves me, but I need to talk to a human.’”
A furry cosplayer responds, "I need to talk to a human."
A Wiccan Princess retorts, "Nature is not as inventive as she thinks she is; Neither is God"
The Man answers,
“We are a beautiful blasphemy to God’s word (because we question).”
“Heavy is the crown that wears the head,” says the child prince.
The Drag King quotes, “Psalms (chap.):13
You will tread on the lion and the cobra.
You will trample on the great lion and the serpent.”
"...And God teaches the cricket how to play his music," says the bookish-looking woman sitting in the corner, trailing off as she adjusts her literal Coke bottle frames.
A gym rat, wearing a holey muscle shirt, extends arm to point as he says,
“Humans begin as *******.”
“Humans are also stardust.
Which means we are golden,” replies the scientist
“I will show you fear in a handful of dust,” says the derelict businessman hobo hero,
“God made mud in his own image and we are the leftover **** that rose out of it.
And if all life is really God’s sacred mud, then every **** storm is God’s Wrath.”
The Man quotes T.S. Eliot,
“What are the roots that clutch. What branches grow out of this stony *******. Son of man, you cannot say or guess, for you know only a heap of broken images.”
"The grapes of wrath transmuted into the harvest of imagination,” illustrates the painter
The automaton states, “**** the earth, to make a certain sense of it all.”
The Man attempts to regain control,
“Some future digger after truth,
alien or human, kneeling with
trowel and brush at this grave,
will note in clear, careful script
the wonder that a people would
be so deliberate with the smallest
of their gods' creatures,
and so careless of themselves.”
A soccer Mom asks,
“They say I shouldn’t be so tired.
They say I should get a job.
They say I should get off this couch.
They say I shouldn’t be a blob.”
“It takes but one step to enter the grave,” says The Man.
“So much can be lost in crossing that threshold. How did your grandparents, born in separate countries, meet? Did your mother kiss your father first, or vice versa? These are questions we don't think to pose, but without the asking or other evidence, Death will redact the list of begettings. Are you prepared for that void in memory? Or have you made notes for your children to leave theirs?”
"My Dad keeps their honeymoon receipts in the family Bible,” says the Unknown.
“After Mom moved on, he would take the Bible off the shelf every evening after supper. He would first stare at it for what seemed forever while pouring himself a huge tumbler of bourbon and lighting a huge cigar that smelled like month old underwear. Eventually, he would open the gold clasp and raise the deeply cracked leather cover of the Bible and first look at the family history written inside the front cover in the delicate and intricate handwriting of Mom, before pulling out the well worn honeymoon receipts, which he would shuffle through like a deck of cards before spreading them out on the worn and scratched kitchen table like a kind of dead man’s hand. Sometimes, he would weep quietly. Other times, he would pound his fists violently on the table shaking the cans of beans and potatoes on the shelves above. That is when I knew it was time to make myself scarce. He never ever opened the Bible any further than the front cover, which made me wonder about the nature of the book itself. I always pondered the same questions over and over.”
“Is Bible a filthy word? Is it the animal? The Man, The Woman? Should we burn the book?”
“Is the Word filthy?”, asks The Man, “What are the filthy words? What are the power of Words mired in ****? Who do these words define? Who are you?”
Mama Evil commands a presence,
“****? ****? ****? *****? Broad? *****? Are these the words you use to define me? When that which defines me is the holy chalice, life's catalyst, mia figa, my ****: stand us all on our heads and we all look the same. Regardless of our skin color, or the shape of the bones in our face or the skin around our eyes or the texture of our hair, those folds of flesh, that tunnel to the precipice of the universe, that little happy happy joy joy button, these are what we all have in common and what the whole world simultaneously wants and reviles. It has that much power. A lexical reclamation is taking place. One that will lift up the collective feminine spirit instead of dragging it down to the depths of all pejoratives. ****! The taking back of all pejoratives is an essential part of the reclamation of the collective self-esteem of woman kind! She is a Hindu Goddess! She is the Roman Goddess who is the protector or newborn infants. She is cunctipotent. She is all powerful and creates and destroys the world with her blood sugar **** magic. She is the princess and savior of the Mahabharata, renowned for her hospitality, who willingly receives any traveler who requests food and lodging. She is that benevolent. Durvasas bestows upon her a powerful mantra as payment for that hospitality and with it, Princess Kunti has the power to call on any God in heaven to lie with her and she will bear a son then by the next day. When her husband is rendered sterile as punishment for shooting the Stag King as he mated with his queen, Princess Kunti bears three heirs for the kingdom. She saves the kingdom. She saves the day. She is **** magic at its finest hour and she dwells in all of us who have ever been slandered. So go on, you ignorant *******. Call me a ****. Only you in your infinite small stupidity are skint the knowledge that you have just called me a princess and a savior.”
A comic nerd asks, “What of Power? What is power?”
Mama Evil holds up a single flame, spewing from a cheap blue lighter in her hand. She asks, “What is the power of The Word.” Is it in the book? Or in the air.”
She answers, “The power to choose. Do I set the world on fire, or put out
the flames?”
The room goes dark as she abruptly steals The Man’s usual send off,
“The Word has evolved, my friends.”
