The Leaning Candle of Jesus

THE LEANING CANDLE OF JESUS:
An autobiographer's ruminations
on some of what caused
the "Violent Beauty of Urda Louise"

The last night you lit
The Leaning Candle of Jesus
to talk to the spirit traveling
inside the body of that
Giant, neglected, wax figurine,
an old film of His superhumanity
genuflected in the reels of his eyes and
He showed you a version of Himself
sitting among his own small section of pews
inside the Church buried inside you
the one that you can get to only when you rise
from beneath a body of reservoir water.
-This Baptism your reward for
shooting heroin into your veins
two times with your boyfriend, Charlie's, pistol
while touring your shadow through a
crack house
that you didn't expect to re-enter.
You had been hailing Mary a long time then
from that sterile mattress you were born on
that became the filthy mattress that supported you
while your spirit dressed in storefront smoke
tried to fly
calling out to Mary
never thinking that
anyone, let alone Mary or your Mother would come.
You never suspected that you would meet your dead mother mourning,
while soaked in Funeral colors
her spirit accentuated with
a wide brim hat and veils.
She sits alone inside
The Leaning Candle of Jesus Church
mesmerized by a stationary hologram
of that image of Jesus programmed into all of us.
"Your unhappiness is murdering me, further" she says,
when you ask her why she sits all alone.
You say, unhappy? who?
You think right then of that handsome underwater astronaut -
the immaculate man-fish who pulled you out from the skeletal grasp
of Charlie Christ's arms,
through the narrow crack of that house
into warm soapy sea water
- the one who said
"underwater astronauts are your able bodied angels, Urda,
and we are here just for troubled ones like you-"
when you had been hailing your Mother and Mary
and Jesus had become just a low flame for your pipe.
But what of rites, wrongs, religions and rituals, you wonder,
and passages along the base of the pyramidal volcano
that ancient, ailing, addicted street archaeologists
dug up between corroded alleyways
that mirrored the rope of their veins.
Passages that lead to narrower streets
flanked by cobblestone tenements
with black windows
and the enormous
crumbling floor-less church
with the nodding, cracked congregation
shooting up heroin, collectively, in the undercroft.
Do such saviors have solstices, too?
If aliens teach our children Sunday school
and the only place for African ritual exists
through the corridors that appear behind
unused church altars - if you search carefully -
where on the other side
you watch African women dive into and emerge from
the earth as if the earth is the wild woman's water,
while your mother sits alone in the ruined belly of the church
calling out to you with her entire heart
"know and recognize your Father, Jesus - "
The miracle man you can only remember embodied
inside a large wax candle, deformed, maligned and leaning
-while your mother mourns your neglect of religion
for your interest in what she calls ignorance and idols
believing that it is the absence of Jesus
and not her decay, disintegration, and death
that causes the sadness in you.



poems and images by: Tiffany Osedra Miller
1st image, "Unbelievable" acrylic ink, india ink on 6" x 9" latex paper.

Purchase "Unbelievable," HERE.

2nd image, "The Leaning Candle of Jesus" oil pastels on 8 1/2" by 11" lightweight vellum paper