| Age borrows my body for a while, as did youth; as does happiness and sadness, and various other transitory emotions, instants and states of being. Age burrows through my soul’s mollusk shell, defying the separation of body and soul. My shoes are holy, they are made out of sand and flesh and do not trample the earth. I yearn for synthesis and integration, for cause and effect, for the coffin lid, for the enigma of a bruise that came out of the blue to stain my thigh. Erosion is coupled with gulfs, chasms and mountains. I draw the blankets of many religions closer, finding in each a borrowed comfort, akin to the comfort of cooking exotic dishes with a cacophony of spices – along with something uncomfortable in each. Happy to be cross-pollinated; aware that I can never be cross-pollinated. | >I began to beat up my heart, poured hot wax over it, made of it a graven image, so that I could worship a tangible incarnate. Was it so bad to do this now that so much time and religion had passed? My heart was beautiful, obscene, caught in mid-beat externalized, my chest cavity dried and closed up. My eyes dried and closed up like a baobab tree’s knots. It was fine to be like this in a desert for forty years, but when I heard the return of the sea, my heart rebelled on its pike, and began to bleed for my chest. So, I rolled away the skin and re-placed the idol. |
