Finally The Vice Deacons

Casey Fuller

 

told us the truth: our corporeality was indeed the true haunting, and the ghost world, and spirit realms, and the platonically merely-imagined where all the dead dissolve out into fantastic bands of pure gloaming, were real, and our bodies which we wished to extol and display their multitudinous physical splendor by parasailing and lovemaking and the pseudo-healing our inevitable ailments that will bring us down, upon entering, were merely corn-husked, sloughed-off, and our shells and all the understandings that came from what turned out to be shells were shown to fictions and, hardest of all, real enlightenment turned out to be a re-remembering of our previous perfections, before we were suited-out in our oddly flawed vessels, before we were born, so we had to work against the rhythms we were so accustomed, the heartbeats, the lovely gulps of fresh mountain air, our dry eyes from crying for millennia, the pangs of despised love, swollen feet from arduous labors, and the inevitable gas-passing after late evening meals—it was too much, we were not ready, we were still so immersed in the electric and repeatable flame of the cells ready to burn bright red we failed to feel the enclosure, the trap, the hollows that padded us out so keenly, the walls of embodiment sealing us off from where the real fire danced beyond us, where we all sat and praised the hazy display of mysteries emerging from our insides, which is why it had to be whispered, while we were beginning to bow one especially reverent Sunday morning, and this particular vice deacon, our particular vice deacon among the million or so deployed that day, began to bow next to us, began to whisper it to us so softly, so quietly, with what was still considered our proper name.

 

Casey Fuller is a certified forklift driver. His chapbook, “A Fort Made of Doors,” is published by Floating Bridge Press.