Entombing
I. Entombing
II. Offering
What relics did you entomb today,
not realizing that this ritual would be endless and never ending?
Fingers tremble as they coax mud into voids
not yet filled with what had once inhabited the pulse of
childhood,
sheer joy sealed in resin and shroud.
Soon to be calcified reminiscences,
pleading with the muck and mire to swallow yesterday whole.
III. Excising
What sweet fruits did you chisel from your now empty husks of memory?
A bladed bone was all it took to pry you open—to spill forth your summers past, viscous and syrupy,
the metallic taste of water from the garden hose, sun-thickened,
acrid,
familiar faces expunged from their stick-figure placeholders.
IV. Sealing
What unfulfilled wishes have you eternally sealed with resin?
Twinkling stars of your uninformed imagination sutured with chagrin vanish, too, into the void, never to
be challenged again by your rational self.
Each blistered dream, sealed in its pristine state under hardened
gloss,
immune to time’s unraveling.
V. Spicing
What sweetness did you retain from memory’s skin?
Like a mandarin peeled over steaming asphalt,
tartness clinging to your chin, leaving a lingering taste of what
was and
what could have been, now freed from childhood’s rind.
VI. Riting
What aspirations of grandeur did you wrap in fraying linen?
Booming sermons, once delivered from an altar of patio cushions
to a rapt congregation of stuffed animals
now fall on deaf ears,
homilies of your kingdom
entombed in shoebox sarcophagi.
VII. Braiding
What was it that you wove into the braid hanging lifeless from your skull?
The line parting your scalp, red and raw, a seam from which
your memories shall never emerge.
Sacred oils imparting a sheen of innocence
slicked across your scalp like a second skin on the verge of
molting.
VIII. Interment
With the passage of time, the you that was will ossify
as new yous take hold and ossify in turn,
binding your hollow shell to eternal silence.
What relics did you entomb today,
not realizing that this ritual would be endless and never ending?