Rain, he writes, is both the trial and forgiveness... It lasts the day to humble her, sprinkles tiny daggers to wet her hair and enliven her skin. In moisture, her knees ache, but thighs spread apart in innocence, guard drawn down with shock. Her eyes squint through the cold drops on her glasses, but she removes them seeing the blur of the world as the grays of an impressionist painting, drops bend the stem of a flower, drops wake the earth, ground, mud through her toes, feet running off into madness. Nature is thus.

You know where they say that anybody can be president? That’s what’s great about America? Well, in theory, only, as I’m not a Christian, just somebody who entertains all options, but do you think it possible that we all have it within us to be the next messiah and where Jesus went wrong, or the theologians thereafter in interpretation, by the flawed written word, deified him so much as to make his state so unobtainable, as for people to actually devalue who they are. How cold the messiah have come from a flock of sheep, when god is our lion, our shepherd? Perhaps it would be better for us to feel that any one of us could be the next messiah, and even in the aspiration, and accidental goodness, society will be lifted just those few notches.

And she saw the broken waif avoiding the whitewashed walls and speckled white tiled floors. The drop ceiling with his fluorescent lights its light a buzzing constant reminder, and fight, a suggestion of the meek, bordering on the rapture. Where else could she focus, save for the talking head centered in the obscene indescript blend of flickering cobalt, and what was he saying, yes what was he saying? To X she was hearing mumbled curses, but not they, carelessly spewn in cause and effect, in contradictory, cancellation and what she, the girl was hearing, and what X drowned out in a practice of meditative silence, where the subliminal whispering, and what was he saying, oh what was he saying?--a whisper so subtle as to hover before her eye as a floater, scatters with a jolt as her eyes try to focus quickly and as X ignored the stirring, and artificial flavor being poured in so carelessly, she saw not an aura but carelessly drawn hands, from pairs of thirty phantoms, forcing, kneading, pushing leading every knotted muscle, pointed toward the head speaking within the sea, and enboxed halo of cobalt blue. X imagined the girls eyes, sunken, and inviting the signal, her head hunched forward, her face relaxed in a Dali-watch sag. At her notice, or as if in jealously, of such a deep and revealing realization, lo! did a pack of dangerous boys wander in with a fearsome fire in energy, raw, each hatted, and encapped, and hardened faces like little Hitler-youth, honing to these stray disallowed thoughts, and switching upon with a chorused "what is this shit," and in came like driving rain and flower blooming of, MTV and lo, the boys all became quiet and even turned to watch. What was I thinking, thought X in the death of commotion, and the rhythm, and the sound and the song, causing a swing of patterned thought, and spoon-fed subliminal blight.