Remember when you were very young and you thought that the word please actually made a difference? Before it became just another trivial sound bite in the long meaningless stream of drivel we pour at one another. Weasel-like and unctuous. Not really listening. Just waiting for our turn to talk. Please... Background noise in the ambient cacophony? Please, take my wife.

Please, go ahead.

Please, beat me. Whip me. Rape me. Fuck me. Please...

Yes, well, along those lines...

Pleeeeeeeeeeeease Mommy, can I have another cookie?

Please Santa, bring me a GI Joe and not another educational toy.

Please Daddy, I'm sorry.

Drivel in the orchestra, the sound of spit of reed players hidden in the small spaces of the symphony. Please is the word we use when that fucking humming noise won't go away and keeps getting louder and LOUDER and WHERE THE FUCK DOES IT COME FROM?!

All forty-odd candles are lit. The only electrical device running is a computer playing hard, heavy, metal, industrial rap music. Filled with all the hate, anger, and frustration of a down trodden underclass screaming for release across the cyberspace void. Pumped directly into your boiling brain at 50 fucking decibels by state of the art audio equipment. The room is 110 degrees, you are dancing to the music like some crazy motherfucking voodoo priest that makes Charlie Sheen at the beginning of Apocalypse Now look like Burl fucking Ives. Sweating and feverish and crying for release.

The panoply of paraphernalia is arrayed for the evening service.

Isopropyl alcohol, cotton balls, several types of medical tape (the sticky, stretchy, elastic type is particularly useful), sterile gauze, paper towels, plastic, towels on the furniture. Scissors, a Swiss Army knife (a good scout is Always Prepared), safety pins (damn that athletic wrap is difficult to get fastened). And oh so beautiful in the candlelight:

The Sword.

Five inches of hard, stainless steel, honed to mad scientist fucking atomic perfection by the same technological minds that can produce devices capable of vaporizing an entire population in a nanosecond. An edge so heartbreakingly perfect and sharp that gravity alone, the will of Rhea, is capable of moving it through space. Through time. Time stops.

The flight begins.

Higher and higher. Up and up. Stretch your arms out wide. Push your chest out further. Breathe in that hot, clean air! Smell the animal sweat oozing from your body. Every muscle taught. Every fucking subatomic particle in your being aimed in the same direction. Like a moth to flame. Echo to Psyche. Black to White. Yin to Yang. All Complete. All is Totality. Reach Up! Touch the sun! Fly! Fly!

The wings tear away. Small streams of blood creep slowly down my outstretched arms. Slide liquidly through my armpits, course wet and warm across my chest. Intersecting and changing. I am fractured. I am stained glass. The sun shines through me in broken rays.

I am on the cross. Not upside down like some fucking idiotic satanic trinket hanging around the neck of a snotty teenager in Nebraska. I am pinned like a bug in the sky. Naked and alone in the glare of the sun. My feathers fall below me. The boiling wax drips down my broken arms and into the wounds. All is one. One is all.

I fall.

FEED ME FUCK ME FEEL ME FOOL ME FIND ME FLAY ME

I AM FALLING MAN

Glass is unyielding, brittle, hard.
With a design in mind
Accept what the glass gives.
Find where the design lives.
Score the glass carefully.
Slide the cutter slowly, methodically.
Snap the glass lightly.
Tap before the break, once, gently.
Firmly.

Parts of a puzzle,
Take form, new design.
The answer to a riddle.
Change, mutate, realign.

Fall.
Fall at night.
Fall away from sun.
Fall away from heat.
Fall away from pain.
Fall away from memory.
Fall away from stain.

I hold you up to the sun.
You scatter its rays.
Upon cold Crete forever bound.
Divide my room with light.
No pain. No fear. No flight.