___________________________________until sunday - by adire___

The city is always holy in the hour of the dawn, when the chapel bells are clearing their throats to call the hour of redemption.

The sky tries to sing, but you are deaf, and you try hear and to remember that feeling from when you were a child, if you ever were a child. That belief. That utterly faithful lack of doubt. But you are a child now, and you have lost the only toy that was ever truly precious to you. And to fill the empty space, you call the silence "reverent".

The slither of sin is silent on this one day of the week, when the day begins golden and paints a halo for every building on every street, makes crowns of the peaks of churches. Every man is a saint until tomorrow, when the cycle begins anew. We are dirty. Make us clean. Wash your hands and cleanse your soul, for they will be dirty again tomorrow, and sometimes what seems only surface grime remains in the flesh forever.

Beauty is only skin deep. Self-deception pierces to the heart.

We are dirty. Make us clean. Make us pure.

Eat of this, my body and blood. Cannibalism of the richest sort. The high mounted crosses thrust at the sky from everywhere, outlined in black against the weeping colors rising to open the gates of heaven, the golden gates with their bars touched in Christ's blood. Weapons of God, tearing away the pulpy flesh of the fallen to feed to the risen, teaching them the taste of man's salt, making of them holy vampires, like the first of fallen man. We revile the slayer of his brother and then pay homage to Cain at our siblings' funerals, forcing tears to wash away fingerprints on murder weapons and feeding upon their fall to make vampires of ourselves.

It is easy to believe in vampires here, peeking out from behind the tombs of angels.

It is easy to believe in anything here.

We are dirty. Make us clean.

Grant us sins to atone for this forgiveness.

Serpents slither down the sidewalks, walking on two legs and selling the pleasures that we thrive upon. But we are holy, and can touch them, and know that the taint will only stay until Sunday. So we shine with our taped-on plastic-glitter halos, we shine with our twisted crosses made from the wire coat hangers that we beat our children with. We shine with our virtue, and are safe in the fact that in New Orleans, virtue is a cheap commodity. Cheaper than the liquor and just as easy to drink, and liquor is not dispersed freely from the pulpit on Sunday mornings.

The liquor is the color of the lights, the color of the Mardi Gras that lives eternal here, green and purple and the gold of salvation. But our virtue....our virtue is the color of smug martyrdom, and it is a color too holy to look upon, for it is dark with the putrescent rot of our delusions and curling about the edges with the shades of festering decay. And so we turn our eyes away, and stare into the sacramental wine, and call ourselves cleansed. And we preach to others with our words floating from lips as red as holy wine on stale golden liquor-breath, and the words are tinny and false, but we say them because they make us righteous, and to be righteous is the best Afterlife Insurance Policy that lies can buy.

We call ourselves believers, strolling casually in the French Quarter with our prostitutes on our arms and a quarter bag of cocaine in our pockets. We call ourselves devout when we cross ourselves after shooting and robbing a defenseless man in a dark alley, in the name of another brand of survival. We save our guilt, and feel nothing until Sunday, when we present it on a silver platter to be eaten by the Lord so we can call ourselves saved.

Integrity is painted on the streets, in magic-marker graffiti hidden by strip-club paste-ups glued next to advertisements for the Lutheran Church, the Methodist Church, Catholic, Baptist, Church of Christ, sex and salvation sold as part of a package deal. There are those in the capital of most pleasurable corruption who live an honest life, who will sell their drugs and murder their neighbors and cheat on their spouses as easily on Sunday as on Monday, and who will mourn nothing more than that their best customers are busy, prostrated upon their knees. Those are honest men who sleep deeply at night, who feel no trouble upon their conscience for living a lie. Those are honest men who know the measure of themselves and know where they stand, and do not fear what will happen when they die because they did not seek the guidance of the invisible man in the sky that loves them so very much--so much that he would test them through suffering, watch their every movement and judge it according to strict rules, and display his love through eternity in a fiery dungeon.

Those are the men of true integrity. Look to them for your guidance, and seek either or sin or your virtue in completion, rather than dividing your time between the two. Faith means nothing if it is convenient.

Faith means nothing if it is false.

Faith means nothing in this city of tarnished gold, for you are a child, and you will never find that treasured toy again.

Faith means nothing....

....until Sunday.

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