Can you paint the surface of a river if the river is not solid? Is it possible to make a liquid thing solid without it having to pass through a trans?

Transubstantiation emphasizes that more than one truth exists at one time: the cracker so white that it almost glows, is a form of winter. It is a body-buzz on the tongue. Whiskey is a form of wine and wine is the blood of a genteel savior turning and turning in the stomach, calling to you from within you.

These teens have been on the road for almost a year now. All three of them decided to leave evangelism together. Their collaborated choice took courage. They don't talk about it, but courage, privately, makes each of their cocks hard.

None of them pines over the ferociousness of their mother's negatively nodding head: God that went on for so long! They don't fixate on what was or what could be. They never really believed in should anyway. The boys of summer are finding new ways to proceed by the firmness of their bodies: strong smells, arousals, non-brushed teeth, tussles in the grease on the train car floors.

Thin legs dangle as they sit on the open edge between doors. They are side by side, passing the jug back and forth and swigging. What they speak of while so much green and wheat-colored country passes them by is not scriptural; speak matters much less than what they see. In seeing it they feel it: so this is the world that we have been missing.

Because they came from the same church, from the same kind of upbringing, they agree about many things without even having to state them. They are a three-part mutation and having actively left their mothers behind, now they are nodding. Though so invested in as a philosophical prompt in their upbringing, transubstantiation is not really valuable when you are someone who is trying to live by your body rather than by someone else's abstract interpretations of what your body is for.

Food that tastes like food feels like food going down. It makes you full when you are hungry; a bowl can be filled with stolen vegetables. Perhaps that is all there is to it: no transubstantiation after all, no inner ringing from a particle-Christ demanding sacrifice of them from inside of them. Being commanded by an imaginary figure from inside of you is a trap, they agree: is insanity.

At one time, prior to them leaving, they had the guts to actually have the discussion. Looking both ways down the church corridor before bursting past the church's closed doors, they ditched their classes. They walked together until they got to the wheat field, then they sat there in the ripe gold. As they ran their hands over the softly cutting strands of wheat a three-part confession took place: "I am attracted to you too!"

"I have been in love with you since we were kids!"

The conversation that precipitated their leaving was a conversion of sorts. Christ had always been thought of as a fantasy lover. It was not really that he was a girl to them, but he was something to enter, rather than an ephemeral engineer perpetually entering them. They would make themselves blood brothers, then. They would release all of the warning that had been instilled in them by socialization and would do so by warming each other's virgin asses in a wheat field: reverie.

Pictorial swerves are elating the potential for a shared picture to sustain them. Three, wild boys are leftovers from lightning dreaming of itself.  Ravenous light continues to crack through the dark behind closed eyes in the moment that they are closed to what one can now finally understand was artificial light.

Sure, he had had a shitty childhood, had left his parents' home before he turned eighteen and hitchhiked across the country imagining Jack Kerouac to be with him in person, as he gripped a worn out version of Kerouac's On the Road. Jack was the only book he owned; Jack was his only friend.

He would repeat his favorite quote out loud to the air as a stretching quaff. He believed it to assist the landscape in its changes: "the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time." He loved the grumbling truck beds, how it felt to him like they were alive and generous, even gifts of female width, putting a gilded vibration into his back. He later realized that that vibration of his late teenage-years was the beginning of his love of touch as an initiatory form of healing.

Now, so many years later, he is homeless. It suffices to say that he has had a pretty shitty life in general: some folks just get the shit end of the stick. In and out of various menial jobs, dealing with bosses who know nothing about gaining and practicing skills that increase the clandestine tremors in the body and urge the body toward catharsis. This, so very fatiguing: causes you to drink too much during a few years of your life, causes you to lash out at the person above you in the chain of command.

It has taken him a while to get where he is but he has done his part so that no one at his current job and none of his clients know about his past, about where he sleeps at night. He has had this job, and been receiving shining reviews for almost a year now. Whoever said you can't be homeless and proficient at your job was wrong. He had not had a drop of liquor for nearly two years. He was proving himself. This fact made him proud. "So sometimes you have to lie while you are jumping through hoops. Lying on your resume is like Jack's kind of mad: nothing like life-giving madness to stabilize a man."

Every day he wakes up early enough to be at the local massage parlor fifteen minutes before his shift starts. By showering and shaving at the YMCA he can look very professional, regardless of the fact that he may have had to walk a few miles in the snow to buy some canned beans with a pop-top the night before, in order to even eat. The more and more he works with clients the more he realizes that he cannot believe in a fate that is blind to his own desires. So, if he wants to pass as very together, as not homeless, he certainly can.

After all, whose business is what his home life is like, anyway? No ones. As long as his clients feel release, feel the threaded gold coming out of his hands into their muscles, then as far as he is concerned that is all they need to know.

At the shelter, after the long days, he sits back into the frayed blanket on his cot and thinks about each client individually. He makes personal notes on the nuances of their bodies: tries to learn from the touch. "That woman was challenging to work with. She was so skinny! I could tell that she has not been eating. It is hard to get into the muscles of someone who is making themselves sick due to lack. Oh, and that other woman with the big-muscled legs: she was not lukewarm in the limelight! What a relief. She must have had many massages before. She was so comfortable in her skin." 

These considerations were a kind of sustenance to him. Sometimes his reflections actually replaced physical hunger in his body: made him able to disassociate from his surroundings in the shelter completely. "Hmm: that last massage of the day was intriguing. Was that a woman or a man?" Even with them naked on the table, it was impossible to tell. Quick internal adjustment-a little more politically correct: "Not that I was trying to figure it out or anything…that's not my job. Healing them, regardless of who they are, is. They kept letting me go deeper and deeper. That is probably the highest pain threshold I have ever worked with on a client!"

He passes through his clients in his mind and body like falling leaves, like items that he has for a few moments before losing them. He suddenly recalls the time he intentionally hid his wallet in the top of a very tall tree, that when he left it there, had full leaf-coverage. The contents of his worn out wallet were scant: a maxed-out credit card and a picture of his daughter. These would certainly be of no benefit to others, he thought, but he still felt the need to protect his relationship to his memory of his daughter by putting it as high up as was possible in a tree.

When he got back to the place where he had hidden it, as an above-ground kind of temporary burial, all of the leaves on the tree had fallen off of it and the wallet was nowhere to be found.

Rough, left hand is literal weight over an elegant organ: one which is covered by a tattered piece of cloth. There are these oscillations: not back and forth but through, frothy. Questing the length and width of a natural, horizontally-placed stanchion moves you deeper into wilderness. The strength in it: flip of the wrist then the flippant wrist being grabbed firmly.

A feminine Jesus is showing us a little leg. Surrounded by summoning angels, but not being summoned by them, this Jesus expresses by way of the sharpened nail in the smooth right hand. Marks are being made on the inner thigh. Phantasms bleed. Deifying masochisms are pristine replacements of typically human, glib machismos.

Is this how a savior asks to be called by a different pronoun than what was attributed, than what mother called them? Is this the power by which a real man unbound from social morays leads so many other beautiful, sweating men out into the forest to be together?

You wonder if Jesus is hiding magnets under those flowing clothes. You peer, straining to find the origin of this draw over you.

Then you get it. This Jesus is the magnet.