Why I’m A Xtian
BY SAM BAILEY
It’s about loneliness like a flower that explodes in your face when you go down to kiss it. That’s what
it’s about. I don’t make rules. It’s about the trucker hat with the netting in the back like a bunch of
gnats got sucked there by a magnet. It’s about the sun breaking its one fucking rule. It’s about the
recycling bins blue as spring. It’s about the bones in us, sweetheart. It’s about the way you walk down
the street observing these things and thinking your life is halfway over, twice, and is that the smell of
rhubarb? Sure. And that’s the smell of everything else in the world that says it won’t harm you. It likes
it, not harming you, everything else. Paul, I’ve forgotten you. But I haven’t forgotten what it’s about.
I pocket the Gospel of Barnabas. It’s about bicycles all jacked up by the sidewalk. About the bulls
tattooed on the sidewalk. The lessons of puberty. It’s about egoism, undone, forever. It’s about cars
that drive by me on a mission they won’t speak about. I know their mission. Who gave it. Poetry, I
need you to close your eyes for a second. Paul, now it’s just us. When we get pulled past the Event
Horizon, our bodies will still be here, walking around Ellsworth Street. They’ll do things like push
strollers and give hugs. But we will be off like sparrows woke up in Wite-Out or an LAX plane that
never came back from the sun. Paul, that’s actually not what’s it about. What’s it about, being invisible,
is apricots on a Sunday in your grandmother’s backyard where the sparrows peck around for other
apricots and come up broke. It’s about the text. About neo-criticism, which gets you here and only
here and everywhere else in the sunshine. John Ashbery, go home stop reading this. Paul Sorrento of
the Anaheim Angels: Stay. And now that truly everyone’s gone, I would like to take my vows and
admit something to you, with kindness. Or let’s just do this. Get out the bullets. Roll them in your
palm. They’re joking. They’re not. They’re bigger than you. These shiny bronze ones that somehow in
the light seem pink.
