by Glenn Marchand
I sinned as a youth, a young adult, hungry for riches, lost in a daze, ain’t much love here. I rebuilt, became religious, indeed, the cliché: Why do opposite traits become each other? The savage becomes a deacon … the deacon becomes a hedonist. Sailing out to seas, surfing through a red tide, a mind filled with piranhas; gazing at you, thinking the best in you, if only we met our expectations; soul food, rereading Psalms, praying in a coma, been like a week without fury—the baggage in the basement, the trapped soul, fiending for favor—so much suffocation, the religious mistake, like we’ve seen better; at my sin, dazing into daisies, the daffodils are arrogant—the topaz chimney. So great the animosity—can’t call it anything else, broken, seated, an Ethiopian crawling into my membranes. He hit his number. He flew further. Many knew he was granted reparations. Never a sign to wit. Never a song to perform. So much perfume wafting from his chambers. The love of the essence, the grapes to wine, the feeling one has for a loved one. The tunnel is the end of life—God is watching, something bigger than us; keeping hubris in that, remaining conceited in that, carrying confidence in that: a contradiction, to be realer, just as scared as Peter. Dealing on another spectrum, admiring her prose, feeling a soul’s poetry—the mathematics to it all, the call for justice, with intentions, they must be consistent.