A Cage To Hold My Dreams
The Latin Mass
He dreamt of being a priest in the faraway days
of the Latin Mass, when priests held their hands
bent at the elbows in front of them and recited
from a big bible planted on an altar-boy's head.
'Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa' they
would say, 'Ideo precor beatam Mariam semper
Virginem...' These words were music to the
young boy's ears who could see himself opening
the tabernacle and handing out holy communions.
He got into a priest's college but he flunked the
exams. It wasn't enough to want to help people
and pray over dead bodies. A priest has to know
all about economics and writing business plans.
Today he sits outside the Trocadero Restaurant
in Piccadilly, an old man in a threadbare coat with
the same three or four coins in his upturned cap
since yesterday. He glances up at the faces of
passers-by who in his mind are still his congregation.
'Panem nostrum quotidianum da nobis hodie, et
demitte nobis debita nostra,' he mutters to nobody
in particular. He doesn't need a bible on a small
boy's head to read from. When the Latin Mass needed
a place to retire to, it fetched a ladder and climbed
inside his head.
of the Latin Mass, when priests held their hands
bent at the elbows in front of them and recited
from a big bible planted on an altar-boy's head.
'Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa' they
would say, 'Ideo precor beatam Mariam semper
Virginem...' These words were music to the
young boy's ears who could see himself opening
the tabernacle and handing out holy communions.
He got into a priest's college but he flunked the
exams. It wasn't enough to want to help people
and pray over dead bodies. A priest has to know
all about economics and writing business plans.
Today he sits outside the Trocadero Restaurant
in Piccadilly, an old man in a threadbare coat with
the same three or four coins in his upturned cap
since yesterday. He glances up at the faces of
passers-by who in his mind are still his congregation.
'Panem nostrum quotidianum da nobis hodie, et
demitte nobis debita nostra,' he mutters to nobody
in particular. He doesn't need a bible on a small
boy's head to read from. When the Latin Mass needed
a place to retire to, it fetched a ladder and climbed
inside his head.
