After the candles have burned down, after the goat’s blood has cooled. The black robes are getting clammy. Where was the bathroom? And your keys — are they in your jeans in the spare room you and the other acolytes used for changing? Asking for a ride after the Sacrament of the One Whose Eyes are Always Open is, in a word, cringe. Tonight is a not a blood orgy or you could just crash on one of the many inflatable mattresses. You’re never invited to the blood orgies.

Who was that back there? The chanting, the pounding of fists on tasteful taupe carpet. You were so focused, so in it. But now you land back in the same bones, a soul tumbling down the stairs. Laundry and groceries and hangnails and bowel movements clatter in your head like discarded marbles. Hunger in your gut and lust in your hips, fine. But why all these other states, these other shapes that grasp the mind and bend it and gnaw at it like sandpaper? The same brain that can occasionally glimpse the Lines also has all these opinions about toilet paper and coffee and the wrong fork and the right shoes. How do you get back to being that intermittent Receiver/Transmitter? And do you even want to?

And is this why you’re never invited to the blood orgies?

Oh good, your keys are in your jeans – helpfully clipped to the belt loop by a silver carabiner. By the time you slide into the busted front seat of your Hyundai, the dark singer will be gone, a memory — a stranger. No certain path from here, no streetlights on the way back. This is why you pray for luck over skill, every time, every time. The impossible turning of the coin that lands on heads and heads and heads again, just when needed. Because you are most usually nothing, and the moments when the trees fall away and the moons shine down always a gift — or maybe a theft.

Hmm – the car battery is dead. Could someone give me a jump…or a ride?