The Last Agraphon

There’s no savior to bleed for these times,
but in the doomscrolls I see mile-a-minute martyrs
roaring and raving on a bad trip to hell’s harrowing.
The spirits have been let out. There’s only one abasement
to creation: making the future the past from a nostalgic
poison. So, in a dream I pick up smoking again. Handrolled
with a fall leaf greened and the last flyleaf from a Gideon Bible,
where an anonymous scribe has written the last agraphon of
the Redeemer: “When you make the Two into One, the above
as below, the male and female into a single One, then you’ll
enter the Kingdom of Heaven”. So, instead of smoking I
pick up Ancient Greek, collaging old LEGO magazines, and
doing a full face of makeup before I go grocery shopping. Fake
freckles, too. I tell my friends I’m feeling cynical but optimistic.
If I wanted to believe the world was ending (again), I would go
back to a megachurch. Instead, I will march to a shrine of Saint
Smaragdus, the Alexandrian virgin who transitioned into a monk
and then party with the girls awash in 90s acid house afterwards.
The next day, I will write a letter to the editor of the fourth
millennium’s chronicles: in this time, we are alive. We gave
Caesar what is his (nothing) and held each other in common.