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How to Become a Prayer
Giancarlo DiTrapano

Attention is the very essence of prayer. I am the bread of only my life. I look at prayers on the page. I read them and I lay my voice on top of the prayers. I drape them with my voice and make them mine. I put on my jacket and go out into the night to meet other prayers. I was nine when the Lord wasn’t watching over my family as I had prayed he would for all of those nights. The fuck, he smashed my brother’s car into a utility pole on a south Florida interstate, killing him and two other nineteen year-old boys. It was a shit place to die, Florida, and a shit way to die, nineteen and crushed with his friends. My parents grieved and my sisters grieved and we all fell apart as everything seemed to be ending.

So I back-prayed.

May my entire family and everyone I have ever loved, may everyone I have even liked be raped and tortured and killed with sheets of pain and blood and knives. Make it take a long time. Make them die with the ugliest and most frightened of faces. Make me watch this please. Do not let me turn away. Make all of my dear friends commit suicide for immature reasons in their large empty bathrooms, crying into their mirrors with more blood and pain and knives holding some bad rock album in their arms, and make it grueling and last a long, long time. Make it embarrassing. O God, shatter their teeth in their mouth. Break out the fangs of the young lions. Lord, make me watch that as well. Lord, let my only child be retarded at birth, killing my wife during delivery so that I hate my retarded child and make his life even more miserable than the life of a normal retarded child.

Attention is the very essence of prayer.

Bring big bugs, bring disease, bring darkness, rotting limbs, and unspeakable groanings. Bring great pain. Don’t leave anyone out. Make the lands and seas unlivable due to all the hate and murder and waves of blood and pain and knives. Extinguish all Life. And then, for the cherry, let there be a Heaven where we spend our eternities hiking over clouds under a beating sun with no end in sight, a Heaven where we are forced to reunite with, walk beside, and listen to all those people we hated and never wanted to see again who died on us while we were alive. Make sure all of the angels from the church’s bright paintings look down on us like we are thieves just because we are new. Like they’re so damn pious and we never were. And, lastly, take away all hope that our lives will improve. Make us so tired and depressed and sick that we won’t have the energy to pray anymore.

Attention is the very essence of prayer

I am poured out like water. Now all my bones are out of joint. My heart is like wax. It is melted down in the midst of my bowels. I may tell all my bones. Hosannah in the Highest.

As soon as the attention ceases, the prayer ceases.