In the morning take photographs until they start to move and hammer your fingers into bullets every evening and in the meantime get a civil war for a face and a desert that stretches for miles on end.

In your free time spread the good word amongst the populace.

Have them compare your inner workings to those of clocks or radios or self-cleaning ovens or some other sort of inexplicable machinery.

Have them sing songs about the bullets you spit from your mouth and how they glisten like teeth and like lead. Have them sing about how these bullets will make their way through teeth and through cabinetry and the grocery store and the waiting room and the part of the bed that sags in the middle. Have them sing of your wrath as a love and your love as forever.

Let them know that when you go to sleep you go to sleep as a ruse. As a long gone road that leads nowhere at all.

Have all of this written down.

Have them build you out of funerals. Out of wrought iron and warped wood and have them take you clean down to the bone.

Dress yourself up as a town hall dance and show them the best time they’ve ever seen.

When you laugh have it be like the limb of a tree breaking off. Have it be the only thing heard for miles on end. Be warmed by it.

Be an angry mob, a lick of flame, a gunpowder stain barking like a dog all night long.

Be a coalmine burning all night, be a sermon and a pulpit and a midnight train coming around the bend as the city starts off to sleep, the end of the parade, falling down drunk on your knees in the porch light.

See how long that can last. Then go.