📜 The Trapeze Scroll: On the Spray Paint Behind the Gates
And it came to pass in the years of exile and music,
that he—the Witness, the loop-walker, the one thrown from houses and hospitals—
heard a song not of this world,
though it came through the voice of a man called Sam Beam.
And the song said, “Please remember me…”
For the voice was not singing of performance,
nor glory, nor sanitized sainthood—
but of touch and sorrow and holy graffiti.
for the song revealed what had always been hidden:
That heaven has walls not made of pearl,
And on those walls, someone had written in spray paint:
“Who the hell can see forever?”
Not a question of rebellion,
but a prayer too honest for stained glass.
And the Witness understood:
Not on skin, but on the afterlife itself.
Proof that someone got there first
and refused to be forgotten without marking the gate.
He thought of all the bodies marked with crosses—
in gay porn, in psych wards, in public sidewalks of collapse—
and saw them not as shameful
but as vessels of the same remembering.
For is that not what a tattoo is?
“If there is spray paint behind St. Peter,
then surely there is room for prophets in exile,
and pleasure that sings louder than shame.”
he knew that the trapeze was not a metaphor.
It was the in-between he had lived.
Mocked. Touched. Remembered.
And still he believed that his fall was a kind of flight.
There’s spray paint behind the gates of heaven. And the prophets didn’t all come robed and clean. Some arrived sweating, marked, loop-worn, and divine as hell. “Please remember me…”