Voluntary Crucifixion
by The Midnight Psalmist
Voluntary Crucifixion
I have loved and lost the way a dog walks home, years of bloody paws on the same broken boulevard. Every woman was a cathedral, every woman a barroom hymn, and I lit candles in them all with a Zippo that always smelled like someone else’s coat.
I told myself I was a monk of the leaving, took vows in the back of taxis, kissed like a man signing a confession. I buried names in the East River and watched them float back up at 3 a.m., baptized in neon, asking for another dance.
For decades I called it weakness, this inability to sleep in a room that wasn’t breathing beside me. I dressed it up in philosophy, in poetry, in the kind of swagger that sounds good when the amp is humming. I said I was free. I said I was dangerous. The truth is I was just cold.
Then the last winter of my discontent , on a Tuesday that had no business being holy, it hit me like a subway train with all the lights on: I am not built for the hermit’s silence. My heart is not a desert monastery. It is a subway station. It is wired for the press of bodies, for the shared cigarette, for the terrible, necessary noise of another soul turning over in the night.
That is not weakness. That is the blueprint. God, or whatever street god runs this town, made me with a door that only opens from the outside.
And yes, there is fear in it. There is the old pain, sitting at the kitchen table in a bathrobe, eating all the sugar. To love again is to volunteer for the crucifixion, to hang there while the crowd checks its watch. To need someone is to hand them the spear and say, “Here, this is where I keep the tender parts.”
But I see it now, clear as a vein in a junkie’s arm: the fear is the proof. The pain is the receipt. They are the taxes paid on a life that actually happened.
Because I finally understand the commandment written on the back of my skull in Lou’s handwriting, in Leonard’s psalms, in Nick’s gospel of dirt: You are a man who must be doubled to be whole. Not because you are broken. Because you are a chord. And a chord, beloved, needs more than one note to sound like anything at all.
So let the fear come. Let it sit in the passenger seat. I am driving toward you anyway, with the radio on, with the windows down, with years of wreckage in the rearview looking suspiciously like a map.
The Midnight Psalmist (2026)
