Sleeping Jesus
The kid’s voice comes at me like an amplifier compression waves, san limiter we’re swinging at bedtime, he screeches he is gleeful and defiant, all teeth he is mercury-vapor white light infinitesimal light, waxing twenty-some years it has long since shattered the firmament he is neither created nor destroyed but his own recursive proof of innocence reaching far past heaven’s luckless grasp The kid plays guitar these days gigs in unglamorous Texas liquor stores amplified arpeggios, tremolo solos feedback waves rebounding at eighty-three megahertz frequencies he is the secret language of angels sounding effortless Enochian notes ascending I’ll be damned if he’s not still swinging after bedtime while Jesus sleeps and dreams a thing that reverberates light years behind he shouts an echo hurtling after dark a call for all at death’s disowning it oscillates, six-strings sevenfold that the kid has always known sin isn’t real and never was
I have a nephew named Seamus. He’s named after poet Seamus Heaney, so this is all the more fitting. Poetry is mysterious sometimes, and I’m not sure how I came around to writing this one loosely about him. But he really was a kid swinging after bedtime once upon a time, and now he’s guitarist in a fabulous band called Sleeping Jesus. Check them out!
I wonder what effect music has as it travels through the cosmos...