"The Book of Nothing: Screamed from the Rooftops by a Motionless Man," By Robert Maguire

Chapter One; verses 1 through infinity: How to defy yourself without thinking, and how not to say everything with as many words as possible.

“Brothers and Sisters

Of the conglomeration

We are gathered here today

To glorify our station

To celebrate our united success

For the Almighty

And the individual deafness

Let us cry in your name

The necessity of understanding

Fill us with Grace-

Ful insulation

To protect us

Forsaken

From that serpent

Less that forked tongue be heard

“A hiss so wrong and unlearnéd

When unfurled

It snaps our veteran, Chinese, handicapped, obesely slim, black, white, red, and blue backs

like those of gingerbread men

“Time owes that tongue no dignity

And being limited and priceless

As she is

Give us the ability to forgo Time

Oh Secret god,

Allow us to exalt you above time

In the dust

Of our humming, lustful vibration

In shapeless determination

We will worship you

In our you-nified opposition to congregation

Our collective celebration of the individual

Together, we will sing a song

Of a million different keys

And together we will chant

It’s billions of different words

For the meaning is not those lines

So let us not abuse the clock

And fret over sacrilegious rhymes

Or the rhythmic panting in our shock

“Oh, closet god

Give us and forgive us our timorous choices

For it is only through you

That we will achieve the volume

The noises

To out shine their screams

With our blinding voices

“Those bigots and those racists

We will burn their crosses

In their churches

“We will be like colonial reverends

On the porches of plantation mansions

Who through a monologue

Of woven tobacco smoke

They deplore a King’s exploitation

And the foolish tongue with which he spoke

We will shout of his subjugation

His fetish for unlawful oppression

While we sigh in respectful toleration

Forgetting the workers

dying in the cotton fields

Of our double edged nation

“We will be conquistadors

Punching blades through

Mayan corpses

Using their fuel

To light our torches

Razing civilizations

Like old casinos

To make room to raise more

“We will be black, white, and clear

That you are our god

The god of paradox

The god of proxy

Providing an alternative

To any religion whose god

Would allow me to discredit it

For my feelings about those

It’s said to have saved

Henceforth, a religion will cease

To be a relationship to a perfect god

It will now be the sum of imperfection

Found in its slander

For I haven’t the time to make my own decisions

Primary sources are too outdated

Compared to our modern day postulations

We are middle-aged

Adolescent

Negro

Half-baked

Cracka

Polysexual

Rightful

Unintulectuals

With crazed benevolence

Inexact precision

And fair assertion

To unbalanced belief

You are our lop-sided god

Our Catch 22 apparition

Who can make us

Into anything we don’t need to be

Only because we don’t need to be

“We will be rapists of rapists

We will attack close-mindedness

With our minds shut

And our mouths open

We will write,

All of us,

A sermon

To end all sermons

Whose millions of words

Spoken at once

Will mute the opposition

With an explosion of violent joy

Without expressing a single thought

We will forever

Move left of right

We will change liberal

To reciprocal

And progressive

To aggressive unfurling

If only to stay as far right as possible

We will be slaves to liberty

Breaking the shackles of our inferiority

But later refurbishing it with a new disguise

We will bestow ourselves the ball and chain

Of our concrete lies

With a gift-shop fact-book brain

Let us be as Che in his hay day

Teaching all the little impoverished

Boys and girls

That revolutionaries

Are manifest in rejection

In all countries throughout all worlds

They are a rumbling volume to drown

The crying of the lost with cheering exhortation

Let us be the most illiterate scholars

On the earth

Our verboseness will stun the opposition

For far more than it’s worth

Let us be the progenitors

Of a politico-religious Illusion

We will worship the sound

Of what we say

In your name

And we will exalt the comfort in

The absolute truth of our validity

That you provide

And create networks of disconnections and anti-institutions

To preach the liturgy

For the church of latter day anti-preachers

Who will deliver the anti-sermon sermon

“We will be all of this

By forgetting it ever happened

By believing monument-side souvenir history

And Box Office documentary

“Omni-opulent temple master

Please help us forget

Our place in the world

To facilitate

The illusion of importance

The illusion of change

To expose the deplorable

To venerate the left

Behind,

the abandoned,

Closet God, fill us with the volume

That will drown out

The voices of the unlearnéd

Allow us to impression

Others in your name

“Your name

Your name

“Almighty Sovereign

I must admit,

I missed it

You neglected to reveal

Before your noble servants

What you are called

“Are you Duplicity

Or the groping ubiquity

Of my individual

You must tell me

Your most noble servant

Is it in the name of fear that I preach

Fear of change

Fear of reality breach

Fear of being wrong

Or, I dread it may be a fear

“of something

which is far, far worse than nothing

which I’m beginning to think you may be

Shall I simply call you Me

In place of nothing

For I am the one who created you

“Me, you are my escape from action

“It’s not easier done than said

Stagnant water is full of life

Depending upon my point of view

Don’t choose to see things by those you find dead

Because surrounding and choking

The pulsing gills

Is a prosperous algae slime that thrives

In the water’s nature, still

“Me, you taught me how to speak

And not to listen

Me taught myself to sit

Instead of hike

Me congratulated myself when I regurgitated

A thousand poetic nothings in strike

“Me taught myself to group people

For my inability to comprehend

The individual beyond myself

“Diversity is good

Religion is automatically bad

Because I saw a Christian

Pass a sad, sad man on the street begging for food

Because I saw a Muslim in an airplane

With shifty eyes

And jumped every time he stood

Because I saw a Jewish man eat pork

At noon on a Saturday

All I see is shame in religion

I see the jagged edge in a church steeple

How could there be a god who’d save

Such reprehensible people

They say

Don’t judge

A book by it’s cover

A man by his beliefs or his color

A country by its government

A woman by which stereotype she fits

Or a politician by which fabrication the media knits

“Well, how shall I judge them?

“As I see it,

I don’t like the author of the book

So there’s no point in reading it

I don’t agree with the beliefs of men

that

regarding my beliefs

don’t fit

And these days

Colors are beliefs

All of which aren’t my own

So I don’t believe in you

Do you honestly think I could?

“Me taught myself

To bleed for fear of action

To develop sluggish satisfaction

Me moved myself to write the sermon

To end all sermons to end all sermons

Me, through me, wrote thousands

of tragic oppositions to what I myself believe to be truth

A primer decrying itself

To show that anyone can organize

1,305 words on a sheet of paper

a screen

or even on a wall with chalk

yet he may still say nothing

so let’s both shut up

and sit down

and talk”

He signed

and sat back down

watching the people

move throught the town