Can you listen?

"These lies are ropes that I tied into my stomach, but they hold this ship together."

I'm sure the poet from Listener isn't the first person to recognize that he was living on lies.

"Come on and sew us together; we're just some tattered rags, stained forever. We only have what we remember."

It's weird that the concept of being a tattered rag is a hopeful one. Stained forever. Forever imperfect. The image in my mind is of the dude from castaway, trying to make a sail. His wasn't of tattered rags, but it's kind of the same; a heap of trash, washed up on the shore: that was his redemption. The shell of a port-a-potty. The walls of a toilet.

Sew us together because a tattered rag is small and full of holes. Because a tattered rag could be less tattered if there were more rags.

Tie me to you. Sew me to you. I'm talking to you, reader (fuck the fourth wall). I dare you to. I am tattered and stained, inadequate and rotten. I am a conglomerate of weaknesses fused together to form the spitting image of humanity's best bastardization of a god. I am the fourth removed tapestry of the Lady of Shalott, stitched from her tower: beautiful, but not real. Sewn by hands more able than I and worn by a world more caustic than I. I will never be the life she craved till death, and I will never haul a ship until you are me as well. Until we are one tattered rag, aching to find completeness, but reveling in our incompleteness.

I'm still talking to you. I don't know who you are. But I'm talking at you. Tell me about your church of shipwrecks. Tell me about the other rags you've sewn to yourself. Tell me about the other failures you are in congress with, because those wretched, stained, contemptible, glorious (I'm yelling now; can you hear?) people are the ones I want graphed into my skin. I can feel you, but you're far. I want to know you, but I can't.

Please. Lets stand here and be human. Or sit, and be mortal. Lets lay side by side, my friend, my family, and be stained. Indivine. Decidedly separate from the eternal. Ripped and torn, tattered rags stained forever, but sewn into the most beautiful tapestry of identity and divinity our minds can't handle.

"First, you have to know - not fear, KNOW - that someday, you're going to die."