I lost my job blowing on the windmills. I was too useful — somewhere lights were going on. Unluckily, I keep showing up on everyone’s doorstep in a basket. Perhaps with puppies. Or that is what I’m told, and they draw the bulrush from the front lawn and, waving it over me, expect great migrations, a plague of frogs and flies, but I say to them, “No, I am not that orphan Jesus Christ, I am the anonymous orphan your son. See: I have the same terrible eyes as you, the same round basket of thorns at my side. Give me that bellows, that marking kiss we all run from, that line zagged across your face to the end of things. Give me that air and that light. I am here to inherit your gout and zits. When you look away from me, is it not as though from a mirror? Remember the big nose? The circular brow with its abacus of sweat and you up there — spider in your kingdom drawing in the beads like a miser. $$$lsquo;Work! Work!’ you say to the hungry as they toil past you on the eternal pointless pyramid. ‘When will it come to an end,’ you enquire, pointing to the stuffed sky, bloated with your bricks and ambition. ‘I only wanted to be eternal,’ I say. ‘Free from the clutched pocket the terrible hands of all potential stranglers and set them out to work on all the cords of God’s thick neck. Wherever it stands or holds things up. Free the labours of the blood from its ceaseless treadmill.’ I am that all-canceling zero. The big nothing at the end of the gauge. I am the powerful entrance to the pyramid. The point it will never reach. I am that instantaneous orphan of water. Just add me to your family and see how childless you are.”