Forgiveness
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I was a sorcerer today—it’s true,
I used my dowsing rod on you.
I came with sticks to extract you
from me.
Am I a twisted cherub, face
half-skeleton, half-laced ribbon?
I glisten at times, but.
I am more than my skin suggests,
more than a body of sin. I have scriptures
in my lips.
If only my anger were the apocrypha,
hidden beneath beautiful cities where
cloaked things ghost in to practice denial.
I am that passage, the real 11:3,
where God shook his penis out in the sun
and measured it against a water lily’s stem.
Moses met me at the Church Street
willow tree, where we gossiped
about Jesus Christ and stale bread.
And we talked about that sermon,
that sermon when the sun came in
as white as those ghosts outside.
I thought I heard sleds and snow angels
bounce off of the stained glass windows.
Moses, you mentioned forgiveness.
How could we allow a set of texts that
break entire empires to pieces? How
could he ever see me as radiant again?
I want to be Rome,
I want to be Venice, I want to be the sea-side.
I’ll call in for a re-written Atlas.
At the very surface of a misty sea,
that’s where I will be. I will float
on the poles, looking so like glass
that he will see through me, see that I
have been absolved,
forgive the pale foxes that ate
his blood in the night. See me
as the righteous sun of a new day.