Read Online The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations Millennium General Assembly by Denis Johnson - Free Book Online

suffering is turning red,
    Money on which the faces are so lonely…
    I suppose another way would be
    To talk about it as if it were a fact
    With which we’re all familiar,
    I suppose it is a fact with which we’re all familiar,
    A network of feelings, darkness, and money, a web
    Of plant life and suffering and faces
    Where everything is killed and red and lonely.
    This is the chief integrating thing about it:
    We appear to be at the mercy,
    But then again it may be we have not yet come
    To the mercy, that we will never arrive at the mercy.
    Â 
    So after I broke the cat’s neck with a shovel because it was incurable
    the parking lot looked like it was memorizing me.
    I thought I heard the afternoon saying just another son of a bitch,
    Just another thrillseeker another
    Hard-on another nightmare. The infinite
    Accent falling on the self seemed
    To hold out forgiveness in its placement of some cars
    To my left and to my right a shopping cart or something I forget
    what it was.
    The point is, the point is I might have singled out
    Anything in that landscape and said those trees are after me; but
    It is the nature of the Atlantic white cedar to invade swamps:
    It is not the nature of this cedar to judge me. On
    The other side of the damages I saw a man
    Standing where the scenes of my childhood had been torn down.
    And he was carrying the next day in his hands, and he was awake.
    Â 
    The orthodoxy in complete innocence drifts
    Into being by a perfectly legitimate insistence,
    And the lonely passion and triumph of spinsters,
    The quiet radios in the red teenage heart
    That serenade the fields around the car,
    The Hojos’ desperate percolation of java
    Are part of that legitimate insistence on quality.
    But when the wounded man is able to stand up
    There’s a second when we don’t know whether the spear
    Comes from him or violates him. Somebody
    Get me a witness now cause I got the power
    To crumble the orthodoxy with my happiness,
    And I speak of things that only the brink of sleep
    Has dared to imagine and only belief has seen.
    Â 
    Stake me to the cutthroat breakwater, turnkey woman honey is that
    The doorbell? Or is it just a doorbell on TV?
    I look in your eyes I get that
    Jailing feeling in the misery of your making tofu
    Instead of—but yet, the tofu has that feeling
    Of failing to curdle due to overboiling
    While we kissed and kissed amid the fumes and utensils.
    I swear to God there are words in the air
    But I can’t read them, despite
    Their shadows’ being visible on our love.
    I talk of stuff 20 streets away because the lights
    And liver suffer in a shell. I love you and
    I can’t break through, I can’t, I can’t break through
    Down there where they’re trying to destroy the building.
    Â 
    Endeavor is that of seeking to be understood.
    At sunset whiten the justice.
    I am a stranger and a sojourner
    And imprisoned, the former in their white…
    I have visited the sick
    Hospitals announcing we cannot live, while the wild glances.
    More than anything, I feel I’m neither guilty nor innocent,
    The one about Father why are you talking wrong.
    I’m sorry about the story of your life,
    I am employed or unemployed, I am a turner
    Where every word of the voice of the radio
    Give me a possession of a burying place.
    This is the one where I change my fate
    That I shall not have to suffer any change.

FOUR
In Palo Alto
    Every day I have to learn more about shame
    from the people in old photographs
    in secondhand stores, and from the people
    in the photographic studies of damage and grief,
    where the light assails a window and the figure’s back
    is all we see—or from the very faces
    we never witness in these pictures, several of whom
    I passed today in their windows, some hesitant,
    some completely committed to worthlessness—
    or even from my own face, handed up suddenly by the car’s
    mirror or a glass door. When I was waiting
    for a bus,