'The boy opens a book he shouldn't be reading...' - JLG Clift

The boy opens a book he shouldn’t be reading the one on the highest shelf the only one that’s had its coating of dust taken off the one that holds a wealth of wonder the one that brings about lighting and thunder outside when the boy discovers its hiding spot and takes it down to read late at night when the babysitter and her boyfriend high on cheap draw from their suburban supplier who hangs out by the dyers at the Laundromat are out like lights on the couch Mafioso shouting on the screen but no level of noise can drag the girl and the boy from their world that’s on zoot mute; the boy could shoot his father’s pistol and no one would hear but the boy fears the gun he fears becoming the hunters son he never wishes to insight such mighty fear into harmless rabbits and deer who always run and who’s coats always turn to sundown red no matter how fast they move because they can’t escape the gun or the led.

The boy is well read his father much the same his father a man of great fame in the writing world a man who’s hurled his exploits in their truest hues of honesty and been praised for it: the voice of a generation the man who’s words have bought the nation to its trembling knees the writer that sees his nation for all it is and charts it down the holder of the Laureate crown the man who’s narrators never reach the sundown they were riding towards the man who writes biblically and cynically of nuns as whores and of priests selling scores in confessional booths and of the filthy fret work of the late night back street strip club funk frontman or bastard blues wailed by the black and the beaten negros who have never eaten with a knife or a fork and who barely talk anymore. He writes America, but he doesn’t right it. The boy is not the man he feels that he should be but he hopes what he sees in the book which he isn’t supposed to look in will help him transition from boy to man from no one to someone from burden to son.

The book arches and crackles big black battered and expands into two uneven stacks of bone white paper with tapered edges and wedges of thick black text in columns running down the bone like rot the boy strains his eyes and starts to read the words he’s never heard before; his brows are raised and his mind’s ablaze characters wielding words he’s been told he’s not supposed to say; men are playing gods and something less and something more than changing laws that were handed to them by the core of time whose ancient hands are lined with withering wrinkles as vast as Arizonian valleys and that are eternities wide and full of nothing but sand and skin and the scars of sins that the creatures he created have committed and beyond the reading the hands are starting to bleed now the creator’s in pain he used to strike back at the nations teaming with his creations but the most recent testament of his acts lead us to believe that the creatures are now always acquitted for reasons unknown despite taking his son from his home and despite leaving the creator alone to sob on his rusting throne as his son is torn apart by the mob that he’s saving as they display his filleted corpse picked clean by the reigning vain and the vultures at the scene of the crime.

 The boy, he reads of perverts and tyrants who rise in the mists of marauding mobs lost flares their hands to attract the masses from the black into their sickly bosom false torches false ways false flames to be fanned by the destitute too tired to tell the second coming from the mega church substitute; these men forged from fear and farce go about their days with ghastly godly displays raping pillaging drinking blood and calling it booze the boy eyes dilated intoxicated by the horror sift to the end to find everyone losing when the world finally mends itself by shedding the wealth of the infanticidal, the suicidal, the heretical, the fickle and the fiendish in equal measures that play contrite but only after losing the fight against the Father’s fabled might; they  keep complaining, right to the end time after time sign after sign line after line, that they can’t see the truth that takes their feet out when they have sight but refuse to register the fact because it’s easier to unbind themselves with excuses of blindness but it never works and in time the much feared man with a flowing white beard and robes to match attacks and his robes continue to roll on as he does through the past the present and the future simultaneously serving as the sutures for life that keep tearing apart every time something starts to go wrong and leak puss and blood that flood the earth leaving only arks and listeners around to rebuild.  But in the end nothing rebuilds, the sutures ripple away into the white light still stained like cathedral glass and the almighty, now just a man, turns back to eternity alone to guild his throne and to sweep the bones of his mistakes from tectonic plates.

The book shuts the boy but the paper slates slash his fingertip the book falling from his gushing grip to the floor with a thud for the ages all the rage and all the stages of confusion and disillusion hard to gauge or analyse the boy, the boy, look at his eyes! Black and drained by the pain the title of the book he wasn’t supposed to read drinking the blood into the cover and now the boy can scarcely think clearly the thunder and lightning still going outside; he has had all childish thought stripped from the courts of his mind’s palace he no longer wants toys he’s not even a boy anymore he feels like a dying man that Charon has left to row himself to Hades with only one paddle to reach the obsidian meridian of other side he feels so lost and so used and abused by the crude and the crass and the story of Christ and countless tangible tangents about sheep becoming wolves when a lamb encroaches upon their shores that tear away as the sea reaches the sand and the dirt like a leper’s skin leaking the slick of their sin into the ever darker deep of the sea the boy wonders later, years down the line when time has scabbed over the crimes of man in his short time,  whether the ocean ever regrets reaching out to society. But back in the room the boy hopes for help he’s reduced to silent yelps on the floor boards he has no one else to blame for not being the innocent he is in the picture in the frame that was on his mother’s night stand but that now lands and shatters shredded into tatters by the shards of glass but he has no one else to blame and he knows that; he looks down at the book he searches the cover for the name; the read has left a fowl taste in his mouth and foul prints of dark ink bind his mind and sink it down the crown of innocence slipping from place and it’s rim hacking his nose from his face as it leaves it’s taken him far from himself and his wealth of ignorance and listless bliss he’s a man, he’s only 12, he’s never even had a kiss but he knows of this book and all the horrors that hide in its slithering nooks and cackling crannies; he needs to remember the name in an attempt to tame the words that his parents heard and read the words that they never wanted rattling around his feathered head the boy finds the title, two words, still drinking the red from his finger. The boy sneers through the fearful tears holding back the urge to relent to the need to repent for the read.

‘What’s so holy about it?’