Our Father;
the sins of man
beaten out of him

    This morning, like every morning, returning home to a cold empty flat along the cinder packed towpath, under lichen covered bridges and across frictionless rancid-black footboards from one side of the lock to the other and back again, holding tightly to the gate rails to prevent slipping into the cut and being pulled down with the swell and through the paddle into the chamber to almost certain death.
I passed a young man wearing a red raincoat, speaking as if to Himself in a timbre that told me His adolescence had been drawn out, and I thought, that thought, that one, that one day He will be dead, and what will be left of Him will simply be graffiti in the minds of the ones, if there were any, who had loved Him.
In His name, Amen.