All angels are terrible. No wonder their beauty triggers paralytic bliss. Pay the favor of the lash to any man or woman who doubts that two moments in their presence up in heaven would be withstood. Snap self-abnegatingly out of it!

For our supper we sing on the beat but three notes off the melody. Some sharp, others flat. This is recompense for selling our time so cheaply and letting wants go bearded as needs. And yet: rent, baby formula, tires that are not so bald as to reintroduce friction and grip to the idea of vehicular control, food that a great great grandmother would recognize as food.

Look around. The sad must not become extinct, even if the sad sacks do, or else the real will, too. Which is both an erudite wish and a brute truth, like pilfered taxes.

I am not sure anyone remembers how to spell heaven, much less find the map on which an X marks its entrance. And why would it need gates? And what would come of our wounds, if we entered them? Terrible but necessary, the seraphic beauty, leaving so many mortals cocooned in their still-to-be-deadness and insulated by the amniotic deadness of their still-aliveness.

he’s the most human kind of otherworldly kind of Greek god I’ve ever met.

Is what was said of the creator of the mind-bending and the navel-gazing and the honest artifacts, to whose nominally intact artistic gaze I am about to devote one month’s worth of attentive immersion.