Out of the ashes will you rise

6/26/07

I had become a conscious thief. And so with innocence banished from my covetous eyes (eyes closed so tightly) I reached under your shirt and through your ribcage beneath the sternum and clenched your heart bleeding between my fingers, tearing artery from vessel, part from whole, and seeing the blood stream silently in painted lines growing thicker with each pulse and pouring over the place in your side where God closed up Adam's flesh and breathed into his piece of art to make a woman (Eve standing nakedly shy but unashamed before him when he awoke; oh what did she see? What did she think?), I felt the nerves burst open in my grasping hand and come out bright red and burning like your soul, and I knew that I had broken it.

But it wasn't until I realized that I had left you there dead on the floor and your numb voice awakened and crept into my ear and under my heart that I became suddenly afraid, and for a moment I feared that since you were dead, you would not feel my violent shaking. And it wasn't until the breath gasped back into your lungs and your bleeding heart pumped feeble urgent life into your torn veins as tears sprung into your eyes, that I opened my own and saw spread across the floor like ashes the weight of what I had done.

So I screamed in a whisper, I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I dashed you there on the rocks and tried to steal what riches I could from your tattered body, but before I could make it past the reef and through the breaking waves to shore, the bounty slipped from my groping arms into the sea and I came running back weeping to you, praying that you were not dead, the rocks breaking open my feet and drawing blood, crying out, Forgive, forgive, forgive.