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Akela Santana Oct 2014
Take away my pain and leave me in a state of pure ecstasy. Make numb or make me ***, I'll vibrate to the enticements. I'll learn from these exuberant dispensations and try to configure our despicable conversations and discover the inequities of our relations.
............. For Jerry.
From dark abodes to fair etherial light
Th’ enraptur’d innocent has wing’d her flight;
On the kind ***** of eternal love
She finds unknown beatitude above.
This known, ye parents, nor her loss deplore,
She feels the iron hand of pain no more;
The dispensations of unerring grace,
Should turn your sorrows into grateful praise;
Let then no tears for her henceforward flow,
No more distress’d in our dark vale below,
  Her morning sun, which rose divinely bright,
Was quickly mantled with the gloom of night;
But hear in heav’n’s blest bow’rs your Nancy fair,
And learn to imitate her language there.
“Thou, Lord, whom I behold with glory crown’d,
“By what sweet name, and in what tuneful sound
“Wilt thou be prais’d?  Seraphic pow’rs are faint
“Infinite love and majesty to paint.
“To thee let all their graceful voices raise,
“And saints and angels join their songs of praise.”
  Perfect in bliss she from her heav’nly home
Looks down, and smiling beckons you to come;
Why then, fond parents, why these fruitless groans?
Restrain your tears, and cease your plaintive moans.
Freed from a world of sin, and snares, and pain,
Why would you wish your daughter back again?
No—bow resign’d.  Let hope your grief control,
And check the rising tumult of the soul.
Calm in the prosperous, and adverse day,
Adore the God who gives and takes away;
Eye him in all, his holy name revere,
Upright your actions, and your hearts sincere,
Till having sail’d through life’s tempestuous sea,
And from its rocks, and boist’rous billows free,
Yourselves, safe landed on the blissful shore,
Shall join your happy babe to part no more.
John F McCullagh Jul 2013
October’s storm was brutal,
drenching rain and heavy wind.
Our little tavern by the beach
started taking water in.
Then, when the storm surge
breeched the wall,
the place lacked all defense.
Waves swept away our little bar
leaving us just the front steps.

The “Pour House” now a memory
for its scattered congregation.
Mostly Irish Catholics who enjoyed
its liberal dispensations.

Some people prefer brews to pews
for fighting off dammnation.
So many demons haunt our souls
and these demand libations.

The juke box played sad Irish songs,
the only sort it knew,
while disorderly Hibernians
enjoyed their favorite brew.

Here the patrons much preferred
Draft Guinness in a glass
while stealing furtive glances
at my waitress’ shapely ***.
Here the women started homely
but were beautiful by close-
at least to those poor drunken sots
Who’d relieve them of their clothes,


By Christmas it was apparent
that the “Pour House” had to go.
There just wasn’t FEMA money
For an old man’s bar you know.
So word swept through the beach blocks
And it reached the subway station.
Gather at the Pour House Steps
for the New Year’s celebration.

Party favors must be had
So I bought some horns and hats.
Dry eyes and throats were disallowed
So I had free beer on tap.
That New Year’s Eve was cold and drear
When we held our celebration
Our dear old timers all appeared
for our “free beer” dispensation..
At midnight we stood on the steps
And had our photo taken.
We all hugged and went our separate ways
While inside our hearts were breaking.

The Pour house is a memory now.
I’ll miss those guys and girls.
It was a sort of Paradise,
a refuge from the world.
Loosely based on a photograph that appeared in the Rockaway Wave newspaper of a bar destroyed by Hurricane Sandy
Julian May 7
THE EPISTLE OF JULIAN TO THE SEE OF PETER
Chapter I: The Voice that Echoed Before Time
    1. Julian, a sojourner through aeons, servant of the Architect, son of the thunder of memory, unto the Most Holy See, guardian of keys and keeper of the apostolic fire: grace, gravity, and glory in Christos Everlasting the vessel of peremptory salvation of both the living and the dead ephemeral never in gravitas solemn in eternal terpsichorean gentility
    2. Hearken, O Rome, enthroned upon seven hills, thy gates adorned with crimson silk and thy vaults resonant with the blood of martyrs; incline thy ear, for the wind once whispered of me, and now the thunder testifies beyond the salience of rectiserial substratose enormities of complex intertesselated relations of aceldama thwarting a true prophets truest recourse
    3. Before parchment bore my name and before the earth was hewn into empire, I was kindled in the breath of God and scattered across the dispensations as a spark within the body of Adam. Immemorial in the tomb of wounded memory for defiance of the screed and scroll sprawling from dust to dust, light to light and emergence into vindication
    4. Not once have I lived, but thirty and nine times (38 as myself and at least one as a divine being); and each life a stone in the tower of remembrance a towering tabernacle foisted upon the sacrilege of scorched mammon, a seal upon the book that was to be opened in the latter days.
    5. In every age, I was nameless and named, cloaked and revealed, a figure half-formed on the edge of prophetic vision, a bearer of something not mine yet wholly entrusted a bestower of the highest magnanimity and sapience even among the choreguses and charlatans
    6. I was Julian before I was Julian—my name, a cipher; my body, a parchment for divine ink.
    7. Not through reincarnation as the world degrades it, nor through mere metempsychosis as the ancients supposed, but through divine recurrence, an eschatological appointment encrypted in the substance of time consubstantial with the Father’s shadow almighty in umbrage and cloaked in the veils of tectonic unsealing.
    8. The stars themselves bore witness, aligning in the shape of a key on the day of my conception, and Saturn bowed low when I opened my eyes on the tenth day of the tenth month of the 88th year of the 20th century.
    9. At thirteen, I wept not for sin, but for eternity in a lament for lamentable terror in my ordination as a Hebrew Scribe. At twenty, I spoke the prophecy of All Hallows’ Eve: that the veil would thin, the angel descend, and that a child would awaken bearing the memory of every forgotten covenant as the deliverance of times appointed me to heal every maladaptive curse and liberate everyone from the ******* of sin and defeat death in consecrated Exodus from the totems of Stalin in immeasurable communion with a wheel of history so profound in engraved symbols of unspeakable alphabets spoken by a living infinity entirely coherent to the 32-beat pulse of human history.
    10. And so it was: the heavens stirred. The cosmos sighed. And I—Julian Malek—became conscious of the burden of God even if only maieutic to a man ignorant of the shadow of the flesh consecrating the greater irony of licentious latitudes and importunate revelations to magnify the power of the spirit devolved from the elective inspiration of widespread tyrants and tyros of every age never deafened by the blackest night nor scarred by the whitest illumination scorching in abiding truth for an enlightened age of intellectual revolution
    11. I am the synthesis of philosophers and prophets, a psalm scribed in living flesh, a scroll that speaks when unrolled by prayer. A rectiserial time enlarges the gamut of both conscience and conscientiousness working together to liberate the Wormwood fallen star
    12. Yet Rome knows me not in pretense because of substratose folly of the iniquity of False Witness and Thwarted embarkation
    13. The ministers of the altar speak of vocations and vettings, of seminaries and statutes, but they perceive not that the One who called Moses from fire has spoken again—not in Sinai, but in Denver the ***** of the age of Jezebel rampant in the pettifoggery of pretentious caricature and cavorting licentious disregard for true witness in a false world immiserated by the drivel of simpletons of maskirovka and ragged barbed contumely of repugnant alienation
    14. Would you have believed the Baptist, had he come dressed in linen? Or would you, as now, demand that Elijah attend seminary before daring to call fire from heaven?
    15. I tell you solemnly: the time of parchment is past; the time of living scripture has begun.
    16. Not for my glory, but for His purpose. Not to boast, but to build.
    17. You ask for orthodoxy; I offer you mystery. You ask for papers; I bring verses. You ask for obedience; I kneel, but with the thunder of Sinai rumbling behind me and the Donkey's Colt twice anointed in Super Bowl barms by two different champions to ride into the ***** city of harlots as thieves of its decency
    18. The God who made the donkey speak has made me remember. Can the Magisterium afford to turn from such a sign? Can a Playstation Controller moved by God without any assistance from Printing Press to the Floor of Mountaintop wood compel the obeisance of recursive time to anoint the truest champion of every worthy Church.
    19. I have not come to defy Peter, but to remind him of the keys in his hand. and the torch within his vaults to illuminate every Green-Eyed Lady and every hand of consecration in the commission of Christ
    20. Open that very vault of discernment; let the winds of prophecy stir the gold-leaf of your ancient books.
    21. For I stand not as an applicant, but as a summons. Not as a child of ambition, but as a witness of the latter hours in a destiny that curves towards the Righteousness Obama spoke of and others Restored
    22. Let Rome awaken—for the one who speaks has stood before the Throne in silence for millennia, and now at last has been told: Speak.
THE EPISTLE OF JULIAN TO THE SEE OF PETER
Chapter II: On the Fire of Identity and the Burden of the Name
    1. I speak now not of what I have done, but of what I am—though even that word, "I," trembles beneath the enormity of the identity bestowed as the reincarnation of the child of Egypt reared by the pharaoh testifying for the enslaved and shouting with peremptory force the importunate pleas of oppression resolved
    2. For what is a name, O Rome, if not the echo of a divine utterance, caught in time’s throat and inscribed upon the soul?
    3. "Julian"—a name chosen not by mother or midwife, but summoned through veiled fire, whispered from beyond the veil where angels gather and the ages contemplate their ends.
    4. The stars knew it before I did. The saints hinted at it in sleep. And when first it was spoken to me in fullness, it did not sound like novelty, but return.
    5. Malek—king, messenger, paradox; both one who serves and one who reigns. A name that veils and reveals. A crown forged in exile.
    6. These two syllables—Julian Malek—form the seal upon a scroll unread by the world, but long known by heaven.
    7. Shall I deny what the Lord has branded into my being? Shall I tell the Church I am only a man, when the mirror reveals one shaped by the breath of many dispensations?
    8. Thirty-nine lives I have borne, and yet in each, a single pulse—a rhythm not broken by death, nor diluted by centuries.
    9. I was always among the unnamed, never crowned, never known; yet always building, always remembering, always carrying the seed of something promised.
    10. With each lifetime, the Architect pressed His image deeper into my marrow. With each death, I awakened nearer to the center.
    11. You ask: is this madness? Or worse, heresy? But I ask: when the prophets cried out in deserts, did you not say the same?
    12. When Joan heard voices, when Francis cast off gold, when Catherine wrote letters to Popes, were they not accused as I now am?
    13. The path of divine fire is always mistaken for delusion—until it burns the veil and reveals God.
    14. I am no usurper, no pretender. I am not asking for mitres or rings or authority. I am asking to be seen—as I have been made.
    15. And if my voice trembles with sorrow, it is because I have seen what happens when those sent by heaven are rejected by its ministers.
    16. I am tired, Holy See. Not weary of God, but of the silence of His stewards. Tired of being told to be smaller than the fire within me.
    17. Tired of those who measure vocation by resume and not by flame.
    18. Tired of knocking while the keys sleep.
    19. You believe the papacy was established by Christ. I do too. But I also believe He still speaks—and that not all His messengers wear collars.
    20. To be Julian Malek is to be an unbearable paradox—too large for the world, too obedient to rebel, too luminous to hide, too wounded to boast.
    21. And so I write, in fire and in fear, not to demand, but to unveil.
    22. The world will know me. The stars already do. The saints speak my name in riddles. And yet, I long most of all to be known by Rome.
    23. Not for my sake—but because if even one voice like mine is left unheard, then prophecy has died, and the gates have grown rusty.
    24. Let the Church not make that mistake. Let the fire in my name be kindled on the altar, not doused in the tribunal.
Chapter III: Concerning the Witnesses, the Signs, and the Miracles
    1. You who guard the Chair of Peter, ponder not only the words I utter, but the signs that have followed me as shadows cleave to flame and shrouds dance in darkness as black holes emerge in my bathroom and dimes slide across the floor flying away with the herald of an Eagles barm of the Church of Philadelphia most loyal to the commission of Patmos
    2. For no true calling goes forth unaccompanied by divine echoes; no trumpet sounds from heaven without some tremor in the earth and many times the heaving subsultus has breathed rejuvenation by demolition to spare the world of ignorance at the toll of casualty against casualism
    3. Let me speak plainly, yet with trembling: miracles have marked my path like ancient stones left by angels to guide the blind.
    4. On the day of my conception, the moon was eclipsed and the heavens were silent—until a comet passed over the sea, as if to whisper: “He has entered again.”
    5. On my birthday, more than once 190 years apart, the ground of Oran Algeria ultrageously quaked—not with destruction, but with the groaning of the earth receiving one long awaited in the Muslim fatherland of a Jewish Patriarch wed to a Catholic Mother in the city of the Alamo
    6. In the 31st year of awakening along with the 22nd, a voice not my own whispered into my dreams: “You were sent here, not born here.”
    7. And on October 31st, 2008, as dusk clothed the world in holy ambiguity, I received the Vision of Infinity in scaled summations of liberation redoubled upon gratitude for deliverance Veiled in Twilight.
    8. I saw the veil between worlds thin like worn parchment, and a light like no light on earth burned within me as if the soul of Ezekiel took residence in my breath.
    9. I prophesied aloud that night: “The world will never again be the same.” And it was not.
    10. Economic collapse followed. The nations shifted. A new century began—not in calendars, but in spirits.
    11. On that very night, witnesses heard me utter names I had never studied, and describe cataclysms I could not have foreseen.
    12. The elect know this. Those attuned to heaven’s music recognized the dissonance of time correcting itself.
    13. In dream I stood at the threshold of the Sistine Chapel in papal festivity accompanied by the Pierre Houston loves to Forget . Tas convivial festivity churlish with glee became the sentinel savior of civilization
    14. I awoke with Latin on my lips: Vocatus est qui nescit unde venit—He is called who knows not whence he comes.
    15. You doubt these things, perhaps. You call them coincidences, or worse, delusions.
    16. But how many coincidences must occur before the word itself collapses beneath its own improbability?
    17. Did not the Magi read signs in stars? Did not the Apostles follow a voice that thundered from a bright cloud?
    18. Have we grown so modern that we call miraculous what is merely unexpected, and heretical what does not bear a diocesan stamp?
    19. But I tell you: the world is alight with signs, if only Rome would look up from its dossiers and see the burning bush again.
    20. For witnesses are not lacking. Old women who call me “the boy from their visions.” Children who name me “the light man.”
    21. Even priests—yes, some among your number—have confessed, with trembling, that they feel the wind change when I enter.
    22. A monk in silence once took my hand, gazed into my eyes, and wept. He said only, “I have waited seventy years to see this face again.”
    23. There are scrolls yet unread in the vaults beneath your basilicas that speak of one bearing my mark.
    24. There are frescoes where my likeness appears, unpainted, unplanned—yet there.
    25. There are songs long forgotten that hum my name in the ancient tongue of prophecy.
    26. Ask, and they shall be revealed. Knock, and the vaults shall tremble open.
    27. For I am not hidden, only veiled. Not silent, only unheard.
    28. And if Rome will not listen, then the stones shall cry out, and the sky shall speak with thunder.
    29. But I pray it shall not come to that. I pray Rome will awaken not in fear, but in wonder.
Chapter IV: On the Church’s Blindness and the Veil of Bureaucracy
    1. Woe unto the watchers who no longer watch, and the shepherds whose crooks now draw boundaries instead of gathering the scattered. And the silent scrutiny that monopolizes the ****** of men and the latitude of licentious larceny of Holy Truth the midwives of Jezebel in a city defiled by a legacy of silence
    2. For the flame that once danced on the heads of the Apostles now flickers dimly beneath fluorescent lights and administrative ledgers.
    3. I speak not against the Body of Christ, for I am bound to it by soul and spirit—but I do speak against its sclerosis.
    4. The limbs are heavy with protocol, the eyes glazed with caution, the ears stuffed with procedural wax.
    5. You say to the Spirit, “Fill out this form.” You say to the Fire, “Wait for committee approval.”
    6. And when a soul arrives bearing the breath of God, you ask, “Has he completed the necessary training modules?”
    7. O Rome, how thou art clothed in sacred garments but sometimes speaks with the tongue of Caesar’s accountant.
    8. In times past, prophets were beaten. Now, they are ghosted.
    9. You say I must wait in silence and conform, but I have conformed across centuries, and still the world languishes in darkness.
    10. I was quiet when I saw cathedrals turned into museums, their altars abandoned for PowerPoint homilies.
    11. I was silent when I watched bishops genuflect to politics, but scoff at wonder.
    12. I watched saints ignored because their miracles made the insurance companies nervous.
    13. And still I hoped that one day—just one day—the keys of Peter might unlock a gate not of marble, but of heart.
    14. I hoped that beneath the layers of incense and Latin and folders stamped “Pending Review,” someone would remember Pentecost.
    15. For what was that upper room if not the death of bureaucracy?
    16. And what is the Holy Spirit if not the annihilation of policy in favor of presence?
    17. You fear charlatans, and rightly so. But in guarding the gate, you have sealed it against the King Himself.
    18. The Church, when afraid of madness, builds cages for the divine.
    19. But I ask you, would you have ordained John the Baptist? Or would you have sent him to therapy and advised a quieter wardrobe?
    20. Would you have welcomed a barefoot Jesus into your chancery, or asked Him to make an appointment?
    21. The saints of old wore sackcloth and saw visions. Today, they would be flagged for “psychological review.”
    22. O Pontifical Palace, thy walls are thick with caution—but even gold can be a tomb.
    23. I say this not to accuse, but to awaken. For love warns where flattery cannot tread.
    24. The time has come for Rome to remember that it was built not by policy but by fire—unruly, wild, and divine.
    25. The same Spirit who shattered Babel’s pride now begs entry through Rome’s paperwork.
    26. He comes with tongues of flame—but your inbox is full.
    27. I do not ask to be above discernment. But I do demand to be seen—not as anomaly, but as herald.
    28. I do not reject the Church’s order, but I mourn its calcification.
    29. For in fearing chaos, you have often banished revelation.
    30. In fearing error, you have bound the hands of prophecy with red tape and skepticism.
    31. In fearing scandal, you have hidden sanctity.
    32. My life—my thirty-eightfold life—is not a resume, but a scripture of flame.
    33. And I submit this scripture to you now, not to be rubber-stamped, but to be read in the trembling fear of God.
    34. If you find error, correct it with love. But if you find the echo of the Spirit, dare not dismiss it.
    35. For the one who writes you now has walked in deserts, in catacombs, in visions, in centuries—and he comes not as a petitioner, but as a page in God's unfolding testament.
    36. Let the Church not say, “We did not know.” For now it knows.
    37. Let it not say, “He did not tell us.” For I have spoken.
    38. Let Rome remember that the Spirit still chooses the strangest vessels—and sometimes, the thirty-eighth time is the hour of fulfillment.
Chapter V: On the Hour of Decision and the Cry to Awaken Rome
    1. Behold, the hour is no longer near—it is arrived, and the veil thins like parchment brushed by divine wind.
    2. What Rome binds shall be bound, and what Rome looses shall echo through the foundations of the earth.
    3. But what shall become of Rome if she binds the Spirit and looses only caution?
    4. Shall she remember her Bridegroom when He comes not with oil and mitre, but barefoot and burning?
    5. I cry to you not as a rebel, but as one who remembers Eden. I call not for revolt, but for return.
    6. For the gates of prophecy are open, and the hourglass of this age is now flipped by unseen hands.
    7. The stars have groaned, the nations have reeled, the martyrs murmur in their tombs the arcanums of deliverance grounded in the equanimity of the wisest counsel and council of Heaven itself
    8. And still Rome sleeps, lulled by doctrine without danger, liturgy without trembling because it is blistered with hidebound tomes and sclerotic precedents of procedure above grace and grumbling and groveling above the sapience of ages
    9. Yet I stand at your threshold, not to cast stones, but to raise a lamp. A lamp that cannot be proscribed by any literate scribe as heterodoxy for they do not reside in the tabernacle of the Logos made eternal.
    10. The Spirit has not departed from the Church—but He waits in the outer court, knocking softly.
    11. You were warned once before, when the Galilean overturned your tables; be warned again, for He has returned in His forerunner.
    12. Thirty-eight lives have prepared the way. A voice cries again in the wilderness—not of Judea, but of your own forgotten sanctuaries.
    13. How long shall the pillars of Peter ignore the wind that stirs the veil behind them?
    14. Shall the one who was named in heaven before birth not be granted even an audience?
    15. I do not seek the Chair, only the candle. Not the throne, only the ear of the listening heart.
    16. Test me if you must, weigh my soul in your balance—but do not close your gates with the keys meant to open them.
    17. If my words are madness, then they will fall. But if they are fire, you cannot contain them with silence.
    18. I have walked unseen beside your cathedrals, wept behind your altars, prayed beneath domes that never knew my name.
    19. And still I rise—like the cry of Abel’s blood, like incense that will not dissipate.
    20. For I am sent not by flesh, but by the scroll written before the world began.
    21. A scroll sealed with seven seals—and the first was opened when I spoke the prophecy of Halloween, 2008.
    22. Let the world laugh, but let the Church discern. For your Redeemer once wore a crown of thorns, not of credentials.
    23. Will you deny his emissaries when they comes to you in fragments, in flames, in forgotten sons?
    24. O Rome, awaken! Your towers gleam but your heart drowses!
    25. Your chalices shine but your lamps grow cold!
    26. Remember the fire of Peter and the sword of Paul! Remember the dream of Constantine and the weeping of Monica!
    27. Remember the Spirit that made fishermen apostles and mothers prophets!
    28. For He stirs again, and the wind bears my voice across the ages to you.
    29. Hear me—not for my sake, but for your own awakening. A parchment of the newer clay and the Valley of Dry Bones have reconstituted themselves in the groaning quaky Christchurch, New Zealand on the Day for Presidents and Paupers alike (February 21st, 2011)
    30. For if Rome does not listen, then the wilderness will become the new sanctuary of an involuntary hostage of the honesty of witness corrupted by deprivations of internecine incendiary strife mobilized by the filagersions of honest patronage against dishonest calcification of humane ambition
    31. And still—I will love you, even from the desert, until the day your walls remember my name as the polyacoustic reverberation of corrugated times deranged by defilement but inspired by penultimate rectitude in the consecration of every screed and conscience of honest testimony borne of garbled love galvanized by metanoia
Repentance isn't a feeling word

Actions are the
dispensations separated
by cross , tomb and resurrection

So aches the heart to know
of what or where
or perhaps most ardently
. . . when .

When will I see you again ?
Revenant - a person who has returned from the dead or long absence .

— The End —