NARUHINA: THE EPILOGUE (revised)
I.
A proper womb presided over a coronation.
I was an instant queen
of a near-supreme periphery,
a double-barreled oyster
of my village's nobility.
Observe, my father bid me in my infancy,
the playground that paralleled our court
like a placebo.
Turn your cheek to young anarchy's
scurrying bazaar
and altogether shun the blond silhouette
tree-twirling on his idiot-throne
like an unemployed jester.
Father-free the day
the simple multitude denied
my pearl vision social membership,
I was accepted by the fatherless..
Hyperventilation passed for entertainment
on the vaguely royal visit.
But jester intervention robbed the bully coup's
banquet of its punchbowl garb polished
with the grimy spike of spit and tears.
I was saved by the boy
who didn't look me in the eyes.
II.
Elementary classroom acoustics swelled
thick into theatrical fidelity
behind the orange swagger of plum stitches
straddling his soft white shoulders
in spontaneous combustion of show-and-tell.
He was my first movie.
(The token joker that would valedictate
the class of the reddening village sky.
The custodian that would thin out
turmoiled prophecies driven awry.)
We were all his dramatic irony.
III.
With sly amusement the desert smirks
at the menu of tease and torture
served up by its solar chaperone,
before time's amethyst allotment
nudges into its illumined office,
blotching out agendas and evident outcomes
with its lunar stamp of bluntness.
A desert-mooned field trip
found me matriculating in a waterfall
uncharting an expanding galaxy of flesh,
crystal bead constellations
sliding down my pale firmament.
Maybe a night's dream
jigsawed his surroundings
sleepwalking him by the bladder
to the ledges of my virginal fountain.
Who would I in royal vanity have been
to rob him frontally of sleepwalk bliss
with decibel direction?
Must all young comedies of error
curdle into horror when
a hidden girl's soft hair swivels
and reveals a banshee's mouth?
IV.
They made me wonder where nature
hid its famed silken-winged freeway
from adhesive residential larva.
My retinal royalty
was bustled to a squint
to register the flashpoint flowering
of fashion sense
by the girls with whom I shared my work and youth.
Cracked fabrics unveiled new anatomies
like the moulting mantises of the biologist
I worked alongside.
I grew up inside a zipper,
just like nature's caterpillar;
no winged secretions of mine would hedge
secrecy's whistle-blowing shrubbery.
My eyes were my wings,
and on their own were no one's mystery,
like the discipline declared
by his spreading sweat-sequestered torso.
No mystery to me,
like his favourite colour,
too swirled up in the frantic extrovert's
paraphernalia for clarity
among a ho-hum village
ever-mindful of the peace owed
to the passing of a blur.
To the heiress of the near-entire
village's superintendency
of sight,
no mystery waddles in the subtlety
of pink as his favourite colour
V.
Maybe the bravery to talk to him
would meet with a smile's consent
to laugh with him.
Laughter lends a lingo to nicknames
and maybe I'm well-read enough
to nickname him.
And were the opportunity to smile on me
as he does on all good intentions,
I'd call him
Anahota.
Why must these royal eyes,
so close to foolproof perfection,
have to save his cells for
the lonely simile of slumber vision?
In live motion let me see them flush
in the heaving honour of his training regiment,
chipping only soft enough to harden
(never crack) his sacred pillars
of devotion, compassion
and unconditional love.
I'd call him Anahota.
The Heart Chakra.
Colours of association:
pink and green.
VI.
My quivering lips
were on the cusp of thanking God
at the sight of his sparing all your vital points
of his solemn ceremonial pins.
Then I read the name
off the lips of the Robed One
photo-opping his apocalyptic acupuncture
for a village under red prophetic sky,
bleeding from the sort of wound
deemed myth against the famed
auras of its surveillances.
A village armed with the revelation
of a royal family's genetic heirloom:
perfect eyesight everywhere.
And the blemish of a blind spot
everywhere.
VII.
Shrunken but in view
I saw the playground.
My wrist gravitated to the harness
of my father's hand
as he shook his head and said
ignore him.
That boy is dangerous for miles.
Whispers of agreement
climbed the murmur of the crowd
and dove from their mouths in horror
when the hollow pop of a broken lock
rhymed with my arm severing
the walk of protocol to run to you.
Like a paper plane with a rumpled wing,
my good arm convinced enough wind
to accept a limp for a sprint.
Sandpaper chants kept pace
with my ears:
get her,
the one from the royal clan
with the weird eyes
that think it makes them
better than us.
I bet she's snobby like them too.
Let's teach her a lesson.
This time
he didn't need to drop jesterhood
for monotone threats to leave me alone.
The tools of his smile so close by
was always jest enough to entertain me,
stunt double for my own family.
This time
I would bring the monotone to him.
VIII.
What is the great divide?
Is it the mapped borders
of ourselves and neighbours
so adamant on paper?
Adjacent pairs of crossed arms
like duelling airlocks?
Is it the instant prairie
of resigned demolition
traversed by me,
trip by scabbing trip,
to split the line of fire
traced helplessly by his sedation
to the coming march of the Robed Man?
Or was it me,
shunning loud pleas on one end
and hushed threats on the other
to fulfill the shared philosophy of both,
half-dipped in blood?
(Connect people where division lives.)
Almost theatrical
was the pace of the Robed Man,
saving me in a way unlike the boy
who never knew I noticed.
I wouldn't have to scream
in accordance with the dream
I pulled him through in years
following his playground rescue.
There was time for every syllable
imprisoned to be freed.
The pace of the Robed Man saved my dream,
even in his clearing of the path.
A sooner leap from the fence of fear
could have put me in the path of his pins,
landing my impaled body on the meant target
like a Shakespearean pincushion.
No such apocalypse was ever needed
for me to divide his body
from the unforgiving world
with my own.
Unzip my waiting butterfly wings,
I would have told him,
and bring connection to division.
And look me in the eyes.
Our stomachs never met
but it looked like I widened your eyes
as my own thinned to closure.
The royal stunt double overshot her mark.
IX.
When did the sky turn blue again?
Circumstantial alternative
to the historic child's query,
yet I could inquire all the same
and incite communal shrugs
among no one.
Have I ever been anyone beyond a child?
(Pawned off by a frustrated father
to a teacher
compelled to be to me
a mother.
One classmate ran off with work,
away from obsession,
but returned focused with his own pack to lead.
Another rarely lifted a lash
off the demographics of his microscope,
focus and obsessed at once.)
I obsessed over love,
love around the orange threads
clothing him like sunset,
nourishing as much benevolence
as hyper human legs can support.
But no focus.
Just a child asking why the simply obvious
was not among my tight-lipped propensity
to not pass tests let along pose them.
X.
I open my hungover eyes
to blue sky and no dividing line.
Now I see the crowd I earlier defied
gathered round me asking everyone but me,
what was I thinking,
just as a frustrated parent
would inquire of a danger-dodging child.
Before the end
I only wanted him to hear me,
before danger locked on
to his sadistic cribbage fate.
I wanted him to notice
what I hid from those who bore
no curiosity of what I had.
My damsel dimensions refused to compromise
with the fishnet festivities I longed to celebrate
surprise-party style
with him.
Is pink your favourite colour too,
Death?
I saw the Robed Man in the litany
of consciousness.
You are all I see in the vicinity
of unrequited growth.
Love,
like the world you clean up,
was never let in on the blind spot.
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