I dreamt about a letter from God.
Taped to my door, at the dorm, or
at my boyish bedroom. God wrote
"incurable, untreatable" in the same hand
that struck Satan, or
that could love Lucifer.

I woke up, thinking,
"I'm a writer:
incurable, untreatable." But in my
basement bedroom, where the glass
dissolves in light and my dreams
paint my face overnight, suddenly
the air holds a weight, like a corpse
laid on me. And the corpse clings on, a dead drag
upstairs.

I could fix my hands in prayer and say,
"Now God drops down, like snow on dirt,
and I know my sins
like the steps of that staircase."

But really, I know nothing, skulking around
my rented kitchen, dragging
a body.

But I know how
to throw water on the burner, and
water on my face.
How to walk
without moving, upstairs, where
the pale light trundles around my head
and I wait for my face to flicker away, revealing
a flame for a mind, eating my
gangling sin,
my body.

I think I made God up inside my head.
I cannot let myself spin free from the walls
where I will never belong.
So I dream, like confession, like prayer
to the insensible gray, pooled
in my boiling head and my whirling sheets.
I'll sleep until God's real.
I'll sleep so the angels creep in
and deliver their master's notes.

Above the stairs, the skylight shows
a guiltless blue.
I walk down,
under it.