Akin to Wedding
In the future it is customary
To have an elegant death
A ceremony akin to wedding
Live with colors and flowers
You will be old
Aging will be much harder
If you are beautiful
Beauty does not fade in the
future
Until just before your ceremony
When your friends will gather
To see you peeled naked of
beauty
And prosthetics
The veil is torn
You are stripped of vanity
A naked cavity
Your body is a withered flower
Everyone will smell your odor
What created you out of itself
Has been waiting to absorb you
You are broken like a sacrament
Your family cries in a circle
The wind chimes wretched with
violin
You draw the heavy breath of
ritual
You will recognize yourself in
the dirt
You will recognize the animal
That you are
You will find beauty in the eyes
of that animal
You will slide from yourself
into that beauty
Butterflies will dress your body
1 comment:
This is another poem from 2001 written in Chicago. It was my favorite at that time. I admit it waxes a little Whitmanesque at the end. What I was thinking about was the Shaman that Burt Stein invited to Wabash my senior year. This guy (I forget the name) wandered off from america and ended up in central America where he was an apprentice to a Shaman. His testimony was that he almost died in the jungle, and when he was beyond all help butterflies came and landed all over his skin. Then he felt his soul going into a rat. Next, he apparently was discovered and revived by a shaman. He was very much convinced that God has sent him to the shaman because the shaman said that he had been praying for God to send him someone
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