Pneumatology

Most communities lurch between decay and rigor mortis—
San Angelo’s Letters to an Incipient Heretic

Knowledge can’t be truth, it’s too far away. I feel
truth in bed next to me, their short hair and brown
eyes. When I inhale their evaporating skin, incense drowns
my tongue like veneration. They don’t like knowing, they steal
kisses from my arteries and pray. Steady my pulse, deal
me paralysis. Feed me tequila and LSD so I can frown
at people who tell me they know things—I crown
truth because I know nothing. I’m tempted to peel

it all back, roll it up like a carpet. But to understand, I would
lose them. What is life without truth? They taste like entropy
and lemons and I’ve grown fond of it. Paul’s love stood
over knowledge, against organized stability. See
the slight flicker, the lack of substance, the falsehood
of knowledge. Truth baptizes me with an ice pick lobotomy.

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Donald Pasmore is a senior English and Philosophy major at Salisbury University who has poems published or forthcoming in Permafrost, Harpur Palate, The Shore, The MacGuffin, and more. In addition to being a student, he is the Editor in Chief of the Scarab Literary Magazine and an Assistant Editor of Poet Lore.