Read The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations Millennium General Assembly for Free Online

slushy street and watch the clothing steam,
    you can’t wait to open up the door when she puts
    the stairs behind her and catch that warmth between you.
    It changes into a baby. “Here’s to the little shitter,
    the little linoleum lizard.” Once he peed on me
    when I was changing him—that one got a laugh
    from the characters I wasted all my chances with
    at Popeye’s establishment when it was over
    by the Wonderland. But it’s destroyed
    now and I understand one of those shopping malls
    that are like great monuments of blindness
    and folly stands there. And next door,
    the grimy restaurants of men with movies
    where they used to wear human faces,
    the sad people from space. But that was never me,
    because everything in those days depended on my work.
    â€œListen, I’m going to work,” was all I could say,
    and drunk or sober I would put on the uniform
    of Texaco and wade into my life.
    I felt like a man of honor and substance,
    but the situation was dancing underneath me—
    once I walked into the living room at my sister’s
    and saw that the two of them, her and my sister,
    had turned sometime behind my back not exactly
    fatter, but heavy, or squalid, with cartoons
    moving across the television in front of them,
    surrounded by laundry, and a couple of Coca-Colas
    standing up next to the iron on the board.
    I stepped out into the yard of bricks
    and trash and watched the light light
    up the blood inside each leaf,
    and I asked myself, Now what is the rpm
    on this mother? Where do you turn it on?
    I think you understand how I felt.
    I’m not saying everything changed in the space
    of one second of seeing two women, but I did
    start dragging her into the clubs with me. I insisted
    she be sexy. I just wanted to live.
    And I did: some nights were so
    sensory I felt the starlight landing on my back
    and I believed I could set fire to things with my fingers—
    but the strategies of others broke my promise.
    At closing time once, she kept talking to a man
    when I was trying to catch her attention to leave.
    It was a Negro man, and I thought of black limousines
    and black masses and black hydrants filled
    with black water. When the lights came on
    you could see all kinds of intentions in the air.
    I thought I might smack her face, or spill a glass,
    but instead I opened him up with my red fishing knife
    and I took out his guts and I said, “Here they are,
    motherfucker, nigger, here they are.”
    There were people frozen around us. The lights had just come on.
    At that moment I saw her reading me and reading me
    from the end of the world where I saw her standing,
    and the way the sacred light played across her face
    all I can tell you is I had to be a diamond
    of ice to manage. Right down the middle from beginning to end
    my life pours into one ocean: into this prison
    with its empty ballfield and its empty
    preparations for Never Happen.
    If she ever comes to visit me, to hell with her,
    I won’t talk to her, and my son can entertain
    himself. God kill them both. I’m sorry for nothing.
    I’m just an alien from another planet.
    I am not happy. Disappointment
    lights its stupid fire in my heart,
    but two days a week I staff
    the Max Security laundry above the world
    on the seventh level, looking at two long roads
    out there that go to a couple of towns.
    Young girls accelerating through the intersection
    make me want to live forever,
    they make me think of the grand things,
    of wars and extremely white, quiet light that never dies.
    Sometimes I stand against the window for hours
    tuned to every station at once, so loaded on crystal
    meth I believe I’ll drift out of my body.
    Jesus Christ, your doors close and open,
    you touch the maniac drifters, the fireaters,
    I could say a million things about you
    and never get that silence out of time
    that happens when the blank muscle hangs
    between its beats—that is what I mean
    by darkness, the place where I