1
Draw a circle on the blackboard :
Circles are more difficult than you think - they deceive
find ways to flatten under your hand :
Make an ouroboros line of salt eating itself :
Lot's wife turns her head to look back at the burning bed of Gomorrah - it is the moment in the movie where the score drops out and the silence hangs there like wool drying in the sun :
If you could step into the chalkboard - into the circle with the flat side you have drawn -
you would be standing on a chalkboard in a classroom -
looking insane -
defying gravity :
2
Chalk is the compressed shell of history :
The ocean's dream of itself :
Darkness bleached of its inky crush :
How does the weightlessness feel in your hand - I remember
slapping the felt erasers
against each other
until the cloud of dead things welled around me - there
is a feeling of erasing the self a sort of tossing of a smoke bomb - you are Batman
making your escape
in their blindness
bullets will not find soft places to press :
It was a reward - the erasing :
3
The chalk box had James in it :
And I don't know what that means - he is not here now :
You find a box in a field and it is stained with the brown of dirt and the red of iron and the holes along its surface are oddly beautiful :
Inside the box are the bones :
I dreamt about removing my skeleton again
this time we refused to go grocery shopping
it was Black Friday it was Boxing Day it was the 4th of July -
we sat in our -
my
- pajamas - we watched episodes of The Simpsons
and then I woke up :
4
The box that James was in - sits in front of you - it has been litigated
declared fake - the very idea - !
The issue is that is is historic evidence for Jesus - the inscription :
Ya'akov bar-Yosef akhui diYeshua
James, son of Joseph, brother of Jesus :
It is another scene in a movie where the sound drops out - unless
it's that kind of movie
where heavy strings rise up out of the darkness around us
telling us that this is now :
This
is now :
5
How goes the circle - the standing against it
the pausing of physics :
The box is compressed history - your hand
compressing itself - is also a history
You realize that blackboard chalk hasn't been made from chalk for decades - the piece in your hand is made of gypsum -
from the Greek - gypsos
when burnt and rehydrated it can be used as plaster
it can build - it is drywall :
The room around you is a box of chalk :
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| The James Ossuary |
