GRAVE

A 1999 hallucination/optical illusion in verse, by Chris Wayan.

Across my street, a robed woman stands in an open grave. A man in orange vestments spades dirt upon her head. She's only a foot or two high, so even here in Frisco, I misdoubt she's human. Sure looks like Mary, though. Hail Mary, buried alive! But not alive for long: now he lights the blowtorch. Mary is a sewerpipe, sewerpipe, sewerpipe, and my sore eyes are going, going, gone. Eyes no longer young. Purblind in this land where old's a crime, crippled's a crime, feet in the grave's a crime.

Do all religions root in our demise? We myopics constellate Orion in the night, or Mary in the grave, or gods behind all, or life beyond the pall: Illusions we are built to build. Fantasy-willed, fantasy-filled. Ah, this sandy streetside grave, full of Mary and old aftershave, yawns as wide and toothily as a masochist in dentistry-- for Mary, for you, for me. And yet, my night-vision's true. My dreams warn me of crashes, (car and money, love and plane) Dreams are no tease, no honey-covered ashes, but solid propolis, food of queens. In our inns of molten blue we bees are practical as glue. If I a credulous mystic be, So what? It works for me.