We love prophets the way we love sore teeth. We touch them and are thrilled at the soft seething gums. I love you like that. I touch prophets trying to touch you. I love all the wiry nerves that web everything together but I also love you. People talk and lasso you into their kitchens just so they can say that God smells like soupy onions, the atmosphere around him is chalky with cigarettes. People say this and they are gutted by loneliness and comforted by it. People used to say you snuck around at night and made the holy people come and it wasn't so different.

The virgins wore blue in a stream of pure sky. The virgins were purer than the prophets. To love them was different than loving your rotten teeth. To love them was to love your empty stomach and the crashing stars that clutter the backs of your eyes when you are hungry. You are not the earth and we either make places here that aren't earth either so you can be at home or we make you more earth-like so you can come and be with us. But the not earth places are an illusion. The poor virgins get tired of snow and blue.

My dad is so gentle I almost never pour my drinks in his kitchen. He says I'll get that for you honey--you want a coke? My dad says you are so precious to me you are my greatest treasure. Oh heavenly father, I hate you in your silence. I love the achy tooth of your scary prophets. I love the electric throbbing world that hides you in its corners. I also love the soft holy spaces in hollow trees and in the immaculate singing voices in dark rooms. I love how at dusk the sky melts away. My heavenly father, I love all the dreams people make of you. I love you the in the same fierce unfocused way that I hate you, soothed by the dreams of your mercy. I give my careful focused love to the people around me and all you get is the ocean underneath.

The faces of the people I love so well. I love well. No I don't. My heart is not attached to a dying animal. My heart is broken legged and mewing. It is a dying animal. But still the world is a wonder of spaces and movements. I drive and my mind is like a high-strung puppy thrilling at every doorway and every person. I confess and apologize out these mazes that trap me. I pray to God to lift me out but all I get are teary silvery sentences. One word and then another. A noun and then a verb and then a gluey or drilling adjective. One then another then a story. How will it end?