Ceremony
for Beyond Baroque Reading
I didn’t steal the fire;
They made me from the earth to punish themselves
for lifting the veil,
for the secrets they glimpsed,
for their whispered confidences.
I sit in the corner,
my shadow chews guilt and regurgitates loneliness.
I do know why I’m here; I am to be held responsible;
I will be the mistress of ceremony.
Depression visits, wearing a pink slip.
Vulgarity knocks around without a word,
and Mania hangs out on the porch.
Pity fucks hard at misfortune.
An archaic desiccation staggers Pandora’s morbid universe, and unlocks the box.
Melancholic dust that falls short behind lust and schizophrenia,
worms through the cracks of dawn.
The first items and entities burst out, wild, mad, chaotic:
A diaper soiled in hard liquor.
A kid’s backpack with cigarette burns.
A toilet flushing down green bills.
Mama’s broken ribs, a lost fetus, her postpartum depression.
Papa’s crushed balls.
And then I recognize, Obachan’s smiling forgiveness.
Onichan’s imprisoned dreams.
Oneichan’s bruised youth.
Papa with his whores on the days of our birth.
I bend over the box to coax and encourage the reluctant.
Emerging slower now, timid, are the raven crooked wings,
the perfunctory misdemeanors,
bliss poisoned by the stench of ignorance,
the vacuum of tradition.
Hatred and Jealousy undress, copulate,
and give birth to the desperation that manslaughters justice and rapes virtue.
The cracked skulls of the effortless dead gape and watch as
A Black Sheep in a diving bell chases a Scapegoat.
My tongue, a cancerous piece of cantankerous meat,
has been abducted.
I get into bed with Calamity,
I wrap myself in barbed wire;
I am calmed by stabbings of truth.
I had seen it there, still inside the box when I closed the lid.
Though they are not yet ready for it, Hope remains.
naoko shin 