Belial

Aged eight, I discovered the dun-colored
bedclothes stuck to me, my back,
when, tired and wince-eyed,
I woke. Sheets peeled away, in stitches

over scapulae was a moss of scabby
fabric; brown pills, clots of cotton
commingled with my own red cells,
the result like crooked stripes of caked

mud. I’d fallen out of the flying dream.
Unwashed and up late, I rushed for the bus
ride; aboard, catching clouds of my breath, I
realized the heights I found asleep would be,

for me, always makebelieve. I’d’ve liked
to wear oneiric-white again, when I went out,
and hope to one day rise in flight—surprised,
and unsteady at first, dependent on ghost

feathers; eventually remembering
precisely the right muscles to flex. But I knew
I was somehow disallowed: kicked out of the choir—
the lowest, below the ninth, but fliers, still. Rising

up soon enough, pale salmon scars, worm-shaped,
painful like the lick of a belt-whip, were all that was
left where wings once attached, but were
clipped; forbidden by my condition—young, but

broken like a grown-up. Aged twenty-six, I saw
a pair—just right: thick, ruffled ivory—
tattooed inside a glass casket on the
pimpled skin of a squatter. Leaning in, I saw

the ivory was more bone, the melanin of flesh tinting
bright white ink, making it leaden, heavier, dimming
its iridescence. His gutter punk girlfriend caught me looking;
he grinned, flipped his wrist so I might get a better

glimpse. Thin script read “in memoriam,” but the kid
couldn’t recollect what of. Then he hid his arm,
the glyph, begged a buck to get high. I sympathized,
still missing flight myself, and gave it to him.

(2010)