I was young but not too young the first time I laid down on the bottom of the bathtub Prone and prostrating myself with no religion Except maybe the hypnotic moon, which I would have followed religiously had my body not been so lazy and incapable of keeping constant time like the rhythm of a cicada call with no reference to the time of day, our metamorphoses of similar shedding, though mine was monthly, and executed in a wildly different way the times of which I kept counting on my hands in disgusted awe I was a human being, the most complex of machines, still incomplete enough to leak fluids continuously and function and there in the empty bath, below the faucet, legs crossed in reverence, I discovered the control panel of my many mechanical movements, most marvelously manipulated by the random input of the inconsistent faucet until mmmmmmmmmmmmmmm, my humble hum, a poor man’s Om, commenced the meditation, the masturbation, amidst the hum of my motor, like a monk below a waterfall, where the water fell between my legs instead, I lost my mind to it all, and the water roared right through my empty head with great ceremony I laid silent and still, as the slightest movements caused the water to fall about me differently, like the effects of a special psychedelic flower; this side makes you big, the other makes you smaller, and eyes closed I was shrinking in my mind to nothingness but a tiny nothing set in a pleasant pool of pins and needles as the water tracked tickling sensations up the sides of my sacred body, my sacred and flowery nothing, until it reached my ears, and the inconsistent mmm of my purring motor echoed throughout me and out of me, bouncing eternally through the dark and watery nothing In the last stage the hardest part was not to think about drowning but I didn’t, because I was climbing a mountain made up of tactile feelings, sneezes and ear cleanings, until in breathlessness I reached the precipice, the epitome of me, and my shrunken self slowly seeped back from the endless dark sea, if only to witness this: I held my last breath tight with all my beliefs and jumped, and then comes momentary exhilaration of fulfilling a momentary, self-created need to jump then there is no then but in thinking of it only that specific now, then there is nothing but the cold pulsing at me, ritual complete I plummeted back into the death of feeling, I rose from that soporific position, a resurrection, ritual complete for a time and surely then there was no god, no thing, no act, so holy and divine

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