Fatigue, where in hell do you hail from? You pelt and ice down the day, in slow motion uplift, outreach delayed. Were too many hail mary’s pushed down by authority figure others to be parsed then muttered from pure throats tight in former life behind borders of countries not my true home?
Have Catholic guilt and penance unstrung like rosary beads spilled on Titanic’s tipped deck morphed into bulky burlap sacks of sharp rocks bending my back, sapping my verve, draining reserves?
Didn’t I pedal in night’s grim middle, ride fast to the nuns, my red Sears and Roebuck bike down steep Regents Drive? That gray stucco convent scared and stifled me so. Thick cotton wads of contrition, joy’s contaminant, wrapped the boy’s heart on cold dark mornings painted fogbound.
A mass eked out in small muffled space, breath held within, assisting the black sisters apace and the sacrificial priest, regal, nearly aloof from all life.
Pleasing my mom, a convert herself, was not my main aim. She pushed hard like Hera above for her first born son to be an altar boy, to redeem the family with no color in its name. I hopped on the bike against my own will, stung between my pink thighs by the icecicled crossbar. Stood at Portland’s wintry threshold, soul shivering/half-crushed, shrinking into myself with no person there to crawl beseechingly towards.
Nobody saw me so small and afraid, no mirror reflected me altared back to myself, no one dared look except ragged fatigue behind metal bars, ready to suck boy life out through my pores, to feed its desire, to leave me to worry, become undrunk dry, a husk of conformity, a so-called “good” Catholic boy, ordained to never fly too high.
No comments:
Post a Comment