To the True Believer, Everything's a Sign by Jack Miller

To the True Believer,
Everything's a Sign

Based on the EP "Steal Smoked Fish" by The Mountain Goats

    We were here once. We buried all the evidence of our journey. We stood by a small cafe on Castro, and you had shaved your head recently. Your Spirit Black cigarette illuminated walls of stucco, and the streets filled up with a sad orange light. We traded liquor for teeth in a mess of green, in the park, on the bus. I stretched out my Kabbalistic maps of the structure of the Universe and the pathways to the Divine on the floorboards, and we painted visions on our bodies. When we finally ran out of cocaine, we charged forward into the torrents of rain and fog and light-posts setting the amorphous black of the night on fire. Is nobody else making this connection? I give it shape. We took refuge outside the hospital. I explained how "booty juice" is mental patient slang for involuntary tranquilization--a sharp needle full of Haldol in your thigh. The people here are uncertain. You're uncertain.
    We had met up on the train. I hadn't slept or eaten in days; I just got out of the hospital, just hours before. I ripped the pant sleeves off my scrubs to make shorts, and I tucked my white t-shirt stained with coffee into them. My wristband still cuffing my arm like an artifact of four-point restraint, I got on the train in the dark of the subway and emerged into the birthing light. There are ghosts in the subway. Is nobody else making this connection? You had your headphones in, sitting in the car behind me. I saw you there, through the glass, the dark. When we left the station, we smoked a cigarette. I vomited projectile onto the sidewalk--supposed I had conned nurses for far too much Ativan.
    Downtown, we watched the junkies dance while the streets filled with ghosts, and no one really knows where their indolent haunting comes from. When 1:00 AM hit, we weren't exactly sure if we were waiting for a drug dealer, a lover, or a priest. But what was certain was that we were waiting. We were here once, I think. These were the orange hills I am not sure are real, after your soul gave me three pieces of myself to sing, after she took my belt and strings. In a state either of exaltation or a transcendent form of selfishness, I understood exactly the perfection of the present moment, the hand of the Universe, and of all created things. Everything proclaimed this truth: the coyotes in the park, the cigarette butts harboring the ghosts of Mission Street, the Herr Doktor in the hospital (--pressed cotton robes white as hyssop like a Priest--), and the eternal haunting in the subway where you kissed me on the midnight train. 
    We met up with some friends, shoplifted gas station stimulants, a fifth of Jameson, and a bag of fried pork skin. All the signs pointed to this. You instructed me to take my meds, but what I didn't tell you is that I flushed them down the toilet weeks ago. When you are a "non-compliant" mental patient, little white pills haunt. I would find myself living somewhere where it snows, years later. Little white things, round flashing. It can be snow, or light, or the light as it reflects off the snow, congressing with its little tragic miracles. So yes, we found ourselves somehow intimately involved with fire-ghosts. Plotinus and Paracelsus called them salamanders and they forewarned immolation. But this was the place where I became base, perverse, and yet exalted, tracing the road back to the Source. Is no one else making this connection? I flick my fingers together compulsively, smack my lips, I twitch and look around sharply to keep my eyes on the road. I know I seem crazy. Is no one else making this connection?
    Now, we have fled the City along with many others. But the ghosts remain in the licking effigy flames. Perhaps it was some last night I can't remember, a party on the beach, bonfire smoke embedded in our clothes. We were drunk inside the City's soul between bus rides, I am pretty sure. But I can't exactly remember, and that's the madness of waiting--the constant oscillation of remembering and forgetting. When I went home, I turned the corners of streets, saw your face. And I looked to the strangers, the passerby, and loved them so stupidly--like ghosts. I love their haunting; it is enormous, and I become so stupidly happy. I see you there--outside the bar, in the Catholic church, in the train station, always tapping your finger restlessly, looking for a cigarette. I had gone to San Francisco General, and only half of me made its way back so I stashed your letter in Anne Sexton's Incessant Rowing Toward God. Don't ask which poem.
    One night, I made my way to a 24-hour cafe, where I met another man as foolish and as wise as you. He was a madman yes, but also just as much a poet. He began speaking about the trance of the creative fire--the act of writing and performing a poem--how it was sexual, how it was rooted in the breath--the pneuma--the spirit. He interlaced the performance of his poems in between the prosody of his hypnotizing voice. One thing he kept saying, which didn't at first make sense: You will never be the same. Remember this. He was an Angel guided by the hand of Fate, and in that transcendent moment I was freed from I and one with I. I became one with those fire-ghosts. Is no one else making this connection? I am not entirely convinced he was not my own self, time traveling from the future. The first Mystery he proclaimed was: 

The root of all power is Change.

     “The disconcerting thing about being a madman,” said the madman, sipping his coffee and waiting for morning, “is the urgent need to be discovered and the still more urgent need not to be found. For example, when I say ‘ghosts’ laden in the sidewalks, I really mean the little poems strewn across the ground buried there, that are like underground scaffolding for the delusions of the City, you see?”

You must not set a fire without first knowing how to put a fire out.

     “It should be clear that when I say ‘delusions’ and scaffolding and ghosts, I speak of those poems like a tabernacle singing into everything from its resting place--the grave of the God we razed. They are the Soul-Makers. Listen as they give shape to the formative dark in your chest—They are the soul-makers. They are the stains of the coffee I threw at the charge nurse in the psych ward, regal little marks dripping down the plaster, they say: Your Art is far too naked. Deliver & conceal.”

You must live out joyously your forgiveness of Judgement herself.

    “Now, of course, after hearing all this, you will never be the same. So remember this. The holy ghosts in the streets vomit and sing, they hold you close, and now you know that we are Soul-Makers. Although you collected broken pieces of those dead poems, the scaffolds fall, and there stands your flaming golden bridge to the tabernacle inside—Listen, for I am a soul-maker. You buried those pieces outside the walls of the psychosis clinic, you turned away to destroy what you became, but you will soon become too—I am a Soul-Maker. Every tragic mishmash of snowfall and devotion and ash and grains of sand, I will set ablaze. You will destroy, create, and you will find yourself created too, Soul-Maker.” 
     And upon hearing this, I remembered that we were here once, waiting. I embraced him and kissed this perfect stranger, charged into the night—I dug up the little psalms buried all around there, set them into holy flames, and I saw only a mirror as I gazed—they looked like the color-fog blur of streetlights setting ablaze the black shapes of night, just as they had done so many times before. All the messages that the Universe have been sending me suddenly make sense, but why is nobody else making this connection? I brought the ashes to the dark of the subway on the first morning train. We were here once, but you will find no evidence of it. I scattered the little oracles onto the train tracks, and they spelled out in the traces of light from their glowing embers: 

To the true believer, everything's a sign. Remember this.

​

Jack Miller is a poet and writer from San Francisco, living in Tennessee. His debut collection GLORY/TREE/GHOST is forthcoming by Bone & Ink Press. His writing has appeared in Ghost City Review, Open Minds Quarterly, and Raven Chronicles among others.