a quick synopsis of ezekiel & the valley of dry bones (excerpt from "bleached: hope for the desolate" :: forthcoming, 2010)

what we have in Ezekiel 37

is the outlandish story

of an eccentric prophet

who gets yanked into Hell

by the Hand of God,

whereupon

he is compelled

to violate every personal religious belief he has

concerning holiness

in an effort to fill-in-the-blanks

for a cosmological census of craniums

and cadavers

and after

he is asked an impossible yet-somehow-not-rhetorical question

by the Author of Life and Death

which if he answered incorrectly

might not lead to his death

but most certainly would not lead

to the resurrection life

of thousands of wayward spirits

long separated from their bodies

after being annihilated

by their national adversaries

but fortunately he answers intelligently

and is then commanded

to prophesy to their skeletal remains

and watches them turn into

[first] zombies

and [then] dead bodies

before being told to prophesy again to the wind,

the wandering spirits,

God’s spirit,

the spiritual wind surrounding the altar

in a Temple that’s been destroyed hundreds of miles away

before finally witnessing

what has to be

the craziest miracle in history.