But no one counts the hours or the years. There are no seasons, the days are unchanging. Nothing dies out, nothing freezes over—not the mosquitos, not the refuse in the river beds. Everywhere we look we find the litter of surplus, the riot of vegetation, the overgrowth of humanity spilling out, as if God’s thermometer has snapped apart over the streets and its mercury dots are the motorcycles.

Five men sit under a sheet metal screen, quiet as a constellation. They are waiting. They are blank with waiting, waiting for anything to happen. The hours pass uncounted, their trivia falling into the gutters with the rest of it, with the wastes of humanity.

This peace is mystic, ancient and crushing. They say never to add music to what silence has said best, but this is a peace I want to shatter with a chord. And you—with you I want to rouse the street, not to prayer but to life. I want us to inspire the roofs to lift and the vines to tumble, the city to erupt like the volcanos that surround it, leaving gardens in the craters and love letters in the igneous pillars.

Tonight, love, I want us to gather up and organize. For tomorrow before dawn, we storm the mosques, we fill them and spill out of their grounds, and like a choir of thousands, we sing through their megaphones. Tomorrow we will make an instrument of them, the greatest ever built, the throat of Jakarta, a resonance that will rise into the sky and fall onto our heads, a celestial finger that, touching our foreheads, will lift us to our feet for sunrise.

There is a new section, Stories, where I post material that has been published elsewhere:

• http://secretvespers.com/stories/

And, there are t-shirts for sale at the Shop:

• http://secretvespers.com/shop/

• http://www.quietbabylon.com/2009/05/29/6-things-that-give-me-a-crushing-sense-of-scale/

These Secret Vespers installments are tagged with scale, though many others could be. That crushing sense is one of the hardest sensations for me to put to words. Like love, hope, and so many other pre-verbal feelings, I find I can set it up with words or art, but that’s all I can do. The rest happens in the viewer or reader.

I get sort of dizzy, sort of light-heading, and I feel sort of outside myself when the scale of something big hits me. The traffic seen from above a major highway does this to me. The ocean, especially when stormy, does this to me. That documentary, Baraka, does this to me.

But enough about me. What has given you a crushing sense of scale?

You can buy a copy for your own, or, for the greatly rewarding experience of giving, you can hand them out to all your friends. Witty and wistful, folks; we’ve got it all right here. Order them from the Secret Vespers Shop, where they wait beside many other delightful items, or at Angel House Press, or by clicking the button below. Thanks so much for reading; you really are the best readers and commentators anywhere on the Internet.

Lovesick is a series of confessions to the Internet. Each one is posted live. Each one attempts to capture the loss or impossible fantasy of a lovesick, sleep-deprived character.

You will find the same images you find here, plus there is a discussion section. Right now we are deciding which installments to use in a small print run this autumn. It looks like there is a video section, too. Someday we will have to put something there.

As always, thanks for reading!