Prayer

Lord,
Undermine not my earthly pleasure
Nor dilute my human drama
When it takes form( amplified yet weakly)
In a fatal romance, a popular domestic fable
I know thou art perfected in the heavens
Not to be undone by a sick child
As I would have thee
Take from me my shame in mute living, and mute death
Grant me peace in my tidal strength
And peace for them who live and ride upon it
I can not see you and so I pray to be freed from your holy ghosts
That roll about and are smoothed away
In the foundationless-ebb and flow of wet physicality beneath me
I reach for them and feel only the rocks
Fear and concavity
Smooth stones to be placed inside me
To fill
Deceived in the dark
The titans, if ever they were such,
Children, that would cry for their father
And supplant him in his inadequacy and vicarious sorrow,
Have fled and left only the stones and the ghosts-indistinguishable
Touch the smoothed stones and set them aglow
Banishing the dead in revealed transparency
And attracting the living in revealed opacity
Let me call these gifts my own

-Apes Blood