The first 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, Cat Russell, 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, Mitch James, Ellie St. Cyr, and Evan Spooner
“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.
“But when your empty heart is weighed”
"What are you really worth?
These people call this Faith,
bring them to my table
the next bit of gospel
I wrote on a napkin”
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.
The people in the room greet one another, then swarm around one woman,
“You will be used to the treatments.”
“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”
Princess Mommy steps up 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 (holy) Word is debated, discussed, dissected, compromised, altered, changed, shredded, reused, updated, recreated. It is burnt to cinders, then rises as a phoenix, built out of the broken pieces of all that was said before; what used to be true, but is now casually agreed to be fallacy. This Faith 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.”
“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?”
“I am the mask wearing the man of eternity. In me, you see the face of history. A history we make up as we go.
The God of fallen leaves, leaves us... waiting for eternity to begin.
The Prophet Vonnegut says, ‘The question echoes back through time and disappears.
History. Read it and weep.
Tonight is a verb.”
From the crowd come the First voice, reading from his screenplay, "I was the table of contents, a footnote... running away from the beginning of the book. Perhaps no one knew we were living happily ever after until the book was over."
The Mallrat replies,
“Of all the words of Mice and Men the saddest words are ‘It Might’ve been.’
No need to despair
It was
It has
Somewhere else
Your soul is saved
All that Might’ve has already happened. ‘
“We are charming little liars,” retorts The Man, “We are a beautiful blasphemy to God’s word.”
The comic nerd slowly whispers, “All is truth, but every man is a liar. Sell me another artificially-derived slow suicide.”
A scientist cleans his glasses as he recites, “A world full of smoke and mirror nonsense -
It’s a religion of smoke and mirror nonsense
Only The Word is true and we make it up as we go.
In Nonsense is strength”
“So it is spoken, so it is true,” The Man energetically agrees.
An alien voice asks choppily, “Touch me
if you want to
believe in me
and the nothing I know”
“Sing the praises of the Holy Unknowing,” croons The Man, “We know nothing, therefore, we know all.”
And then, he drops into a haiku,
A bi-gender beauty asks no one (for permission), “Let me sling a little freestyle verse,
I'm steeple chased because some animal church wants to make me foxtrot in tempo with the braying boy
Pinnochio wants to make me hog its slops like Pigpen McSomething grateful and dead.
A fountain of youthful talent chemically imbalanced.
...with a grey skull full of He-man."
"Look at him!" they say.
"Give him a gun!" says another.
"A bomb!" a third spurts.
"Shows us your trigger finger!" they yell.
"My little boy," Princess Mommy whispers below the rush of gruff voices, her words staccato.
They answer her, "So I CAN taste the infernal darkness,” as the crowd falls silent
Princess Mommy chides them, “We know there is a sweetness in that which we cannot see. We know there is danger in that which we cannot hear.
Our bodies shake, our minds quake in anticipation of his words. It is almost time.”
The Man speaks again.
"Surely it is known, my brethren, that we are the Third Coming, the Breaking of the Seventh Seal that will signal the end of our oppressors. When we emerge victorious from the fires of battle, there will be no value left in the binary. No twos, only two or more. The Old Ways shall perish. We will shake off the chains, pull out the nails from our hands and feet, and the world which rejected us will rise anew under our leadership. Surely, it is known. Surely, it has been spoken. Jesus themself is at our back, and therefore we shall not fail."
“What a wealthy country, but no one’s coming to pay my bail,” sings the rainbow man, “They’re bragging they own my soul.”
"I don't want to bother anyone with my prayers,” prays the bi-gender person, secretly proud of leading the riot.
Sensing it is time to take to the streets, The Man closes the meeting with the same send off,
“The Word has evolved, my friends.”
