Torint

GaiaCan you see me? What are your branches, where is your face? If you truly have apples in your cheeks and leaves woven into you then where am I in your eyes? Though you are here you are also across a sea, a rift of molecules and grass and whispered sighs that we write off as simply nothing. If you put down your roots do we grow together? As your boughs climb to exultant heights I sit in the deepest depths of scholarliness, I am as a child come before a maelstrom, and I fall from myself and into what? Your eyes reradiate all encompassing warmth, chlorophyll love. Can you see me? Do I want you to?Noah Heinrich

SecularityI am chanting mindlessly to the music, and I do not find anythingworth spelling, because what is language to a priest, what is time to a cleric, a bishopwho can only bless his own reflections, a rabbi in a world where everybodyis circumcised, but only he knows why?-Noah Heinrich

StoryI once met a man with no name. He had no family name, no middle name, no first name, not even a nickname. No one knew where he came from, or where he was born. He had no religion to speak of, and he seemed to belong to any ethnic group you care to think of. So nameless was he. What does one call a man with no name? Mostly, people called him “You there” or “Hey, You” and “Asshole,” this being Chicago. As to how I met this man with no name, the story begins thusly. I was standing in line at a hot dog cart downtown. The guy in front was ordering, and it was taking him forever. “I’d like it with ketchup and mustard, and relish… no! Not re...

Dunino DenThere is a place behind a church far away from here.A place where ghosts from a misty past mingle with the sleeping spiritsof trees. Where a stagnant well, with all religious implications lost, plays a duet with a clear brook. Charmsdecorate the honeycomb cliffs, and tokens hang from branches like wasp’s nests. Grass does notgrow, behind that graveyard, because the ground has already been occupied by a force of dead leaves and needles.In that hollow, assaulted on all sides by dwarf mountains, there are stairs, impossibly antique. They lead to thedruid well, which I mentioned earlier. The sun patterns the soft ground and mossed ro...

Smells Like EnlightenmentDo you smell that? That’s the sickly sweet stench of serenity. Put your nose to the shadow and take a whiff. It burns the nostrils, and to be honest, it’s a load of crap wrapped in popular culture and fads, put in a box decorated with plastic lotuses. Middle class and age mothers and fathers slowly becoming mystics and lame saints. Jolly fat men holding burning sticks, ash falling on his most revered bald pate, laughing at himself and everyone around him, saying, “Who are you? What do you hope to gain?” Stainless steel and brass loops selling for twenty dollars on a higher broadcast, koi fish wrapped about arms, th...