Believe Make Believe

Sometimes on sundays, I would find her in the church lot on Florence and Hamilton just people watching. She told me she was a member, but I've never seen her go in.
One say I came up to her just before the mass was to begin and told her I thought I might join her that day. She started to talk me out of it but came up dry.
...it was the old sort of Catholic church with a priest so stately but ancient and he just wouldn't die.
there were strange bird baths on the wall she said were baptismal fonts. SHe said: wash yourself with this water and your sins will be cleansed.
I doused my cock when no one was looking and prayed the the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost amen that I might be able to come back after each time I fucked her.
For the next hour, I listened closely to latin songs and stories and understood nothing. Sometimes she would exclaim or join singing, but mostly she just played snake on her cell-phone. She would get nervous at the idea of the place and scratch at her back a little. I knew it didn't itch, she just fucking liked doing it.
Last tuesday; I went to visit her at her mom's cottage in Jersey. Her mom said it would be better for Clara is we saw less of eachother, due to my condition.
I understand because I went to a baseball game with them the week before and the guy in front of me was so tall that I couldn't see over him so I just pushed him to the bottom of the bleachers real gentle like.
The security guy who'd been letting us smoke down joints and bring in our own beer and everything for the whole season made me leave and then Clara's momma said she was sort of uncomfortable with my being around so much.
I told her I'd never do anything wrong to her daughter and I told her about all the sins I'd had forgiven by the water and the holy trinity and the priest and all that, but she said that's not the point.
This afternoon, Clara came by my studio to pick up some photographs we'd taken together some time ago. We had gone down to this park in my dad's neighborhood and played with the long shutterspeed on my manual camera. She looks like a really tall ghost perched on three swings at the same time. You can almost read the faded-out writing on her Save the Eastern Bluebirds t-shirt she got from that seminar last summer.
She told me she just wanted to borrow the photos for a project she was working on; a project she would submit to a bunch of important people in New York who would make us rich and famous; but I can tell by the way she is scratching at the back of her neck that she isn't coming back. I can tell by the way she cracks her thumbs then turns and leaves that her ghost on three swings image will get longer and longer; lighter and lighter, until you cant even see that there are birds on her shirt anymore.
I am going to find an alter somewhere, I think. An alter where I can scuff out footprints, any evidence of having been there, but get down on my knees and start beliveing in some sort of ressurection, some sort of death, some sort of birth.