Torint

Smells Like Enlightenment Do you smell that? That’s the sickly sweet stench of serenity. Put your nose to the shadow and take a whiff. It burns the nostrils, and to be honest, it’s a load of crap wrapped in popular culture and fads, put in a box decorated with plastic lotuses. Middle class and age mothers and fathers slowly becoming mystics and lame saints. Jolly fat men holding burning sticks, ash falling on his most revered bald pate, laughing at himself and everyone around him, saying, “Who are you? What do you hope to gain?” Stainless steel and brass loops selling for twenty dollars on a higher broad

Dunino Den   There is a place   behind a church   far away from here.   A place where ghosts from   a misty past mingle   with the sleeping spirits   of trees. Where a stagnant well,   with all religious implications lost,   plays a duet with a clear brook. Charms   decorate the honeycomb cliffs,   and tokens hang from branches like   wasp’s nests. Grass does not   grow, behind that graveyard,   because the ground has already been occupied   by a force of dead leaves and needles.   In that hollow, assaulted on all sides by dwarf mountains, there are stairs, impossibly antique. They lead to the druid we

Story I once met a man with no name. He had no family name, no middle name, no first name, not even a nickname. No one knew where he came from, or where he was born. He had no religion to speak of, and he seemed to belong to any ethnic group you care to think of. So nameless was he. What does one call a man with no name? Mostly, people called him “You there” or “Hey, You” and “Asshole,” this being Chicago. As to how I met this man with no name, the story begins thusly. I was standing in line at a hot dog cart downtown. The guy in front was ordering, and it was taking him forever. “I’d like it with ke

Secularity     I am chanting mindlessly     to the music, and I do not find anything worth spelling, because what is language to a priest, what is time to a cleric, a bishop who can only bless his own reflections, a rabbi in a world where everybody is circumcised, but only he knows why? -Noah Heinrich