Long Talk

You tired of making up sins as a child
Before real sinning even existed.
Waiting in line for the pointless shame of confession
Making up stories to please the priests.
To please the others...

It began with greed and all the love
Your empty arms could offer.
Taken willingly by smiling gargoyles
Who knew your strength and weakness
Teaching you lessons left out of Leviticus,
The one about self-loathing.

You, tattooed in places needles should never go
With ink that wakes at the oddest moment
To burn hot beneath the skin.

All your trespasses
All sins, real and imagined
Over and over imagined
Until that movie plays in the theater
Of every thought and action,
In a once holy life.
Where there is no shield to be fashioned
From the artifice of terror.
No true choice in the keening misery
Of the haunted heart.

You patiently explain sensuous horizons
How a landscape of stone and moon
Can stir the body to homecoming.
Creation and destruction
By your very hand.

You show me lighthouse and beaches,
Your water, your wind, your world.
Then blanch at just the threat of touch
Always calling down from Rapunzel's tower,
Hair never long enough to reach
Past the scars.
Past the hurt
Past the word...
Forgiveness.

© J BARRETT WOLF