Stolen Rosary
So I rode the humble vanity of the damned,
cradled in the dark corridor of that fractious
affliction called Past, duel of the I versus I,
caught in a net of farcical day, circumspect night.
Sullen I, lusted for nothing, nothing!
but some small everything, and that tryst
evinced so opaque that I, neophyte, believed,
and now – this riot of the five senses, of which
fully four are free of sin – and everywhere, truth
whoring about, jocular, and the sun, that sycophant,
traipsing its grievous victory like some purloined rosary.
As child, I dreamed a bizarre orange world long before
theory of color became a red passion, amber fire
a blue thought, and white soul a black solace, funereal,
with, always, that hideous happiness hacking me –
until one day in a foreign land, an astounding arc of rainbow
danced like benediction against the mountainside, and I
ingested deeply the singular prism – exchanging a hale
and alien trajectory for the fragile humanity of stone.
Though I sensed a predation of beauty upon beauty
nearly too much to absorb, great clouds swarmed
as a green sea gushing to drown the mountain in its gown,
and that nectarine world evinced anew in the landmine
of this aged and siphoned soul.
Dreams lurid as shark-attack exhumed my shackled tears,
still dripping of love and travesty, that eternal tapestry,
but I, throbbing, translucent, like some inebriate fetus,
became aware of a glaring opalescence advancing,
ever advancing, the possibility of golden adagio gospelry.
