I Wanted Rubies

I shall not flinch from any of it, I hope, this human life. I aspire to apotheosis, nothing less, really, though I cloak it in Buddhist terms, claiming I follow the Buddhist ideal of Bodhisattva. My stories are built around this yearning, this lifelong desire to ascend, to rise up into beneficence, into munificence just because love and mercy abound. I have done my part, too. I have done the work, the little bit that has come my way to do.

There is of course the rest of it and I have had my share, I suppose. I was born and raised in bewilderment. Along the way I discovered hatred and grief. I have been afraid to the cold door of death and even more afraid I would be found a coward. I know the tedium of bearable pain and the agony of mortality too. All this it would seem should be surmounted, but perhaps not. I know the arguments.

I Wanted Rubies

If I was just this
or if I was that, I say,
I say so insistently,
as if this one spell
would dispel the pain,
the dissipation

of my rootless life,
the roots ripped from me, snagged in
tangled balls of clinging
earth to drop and splash
upon the stony dry ground
of my ruthlessness.

July 7, 2011 9:50 AM