The morning begins when the extent of flame goes out. "My love," says my love, "go..." My theological instinct fills in the rest. The sunrise begins when the eternal lampoil spreads across the streets in stripes. It fumes, smouldering.

I submit to my morning meditation. It begins when I sit, legs crossed, and wait. My makeshift pantheon, too, waits, unawares in the train-car way. One by one our supplicants approach, in the preordained heirarchy. Today I am merciful, and I give them the benefit of marking their names in my book, the names of their ordered stations. They amble up and throw themselves past.

My cathedral is empty, empty of trees, people and the gnomes. I've cast them out in favor of chips of bloody granite that castigate the ground. Rusted iron fencework pierces the hedges. Ah yes, this is the fearsome construction for which I've set myself alight. What can this dingy glitter, sprialing aloft, tell you? That there is no room in my heart for anything glassy or anything plastic. That when lungs fill, they harden. That when air is the size of pinpricks, it admits a coinage rain to bless the giving, turgid ground.