Stolen Rosary

So I chose the humble vanity of the damned,
plucked it from the dark corridor
of that fractious affliction called Past,
that brandishing death by life, duel
of the I versus I strangled in the net of
farcical day, circumspect night.  Sullen I
lusted for nothing, nothing!
but some small everything, and
it was foretold, that tryst, so opaquely
that I, neophyte, believed, and now --
this glistening gutter of failure -- riot
of the five senses of which fully four
are free of sin, and everywhere, truth
whoring about, jocular, dramatically
absent, and the sun, that sycophant,
traipsing its grievous victory
like a purloined rosary.

Child, I dreamed a bizarre orange world
long before philosophy of color
became a red passion, and amber fire
a blue thought, white soul a black solace,
consummate, funereal, in a naïve forest
of summoned solitude, two thumbs sucked
simultaneously and always, that hideous
happiness seducing me, until one day
in a far future, far land, a rainbow danced
like benediction against the mountainside,
and I ingested deeply that singular prism,
exchanging a hale if alien trajectory
for the fragile humanity of stone.

Still, I felt a kind of predation of beauty
upon beauty nearly too much to absorb,
so when at last gray clouds swarmed
as a green sea gushing to drown
the mountain in its own gown, that
tangerine world  was abandoned to the
landmine of an aged and naked soul
quivering in indigo infarction --
dreams lurid as shark-attack
exhumed my shackled tears,
and revealed again the conspiracy of
love and travesty, that eternal tapestry
of vacuous sorrow, such that, purblind,
I wend dyslexic, throbbing, translucent,

like some inebriate fetus, inexplicably
aware of a glaring opalesence
advancing, ever advancing, to abort
all possibilities of golden adagio gospelry.

Julie K. Shavin 2009