Spelling / Complication
Serious injuries only! Strange
request from an online escort ad, where one
might think the reigning notion was pleasure,
not…oh: inquiries. (So much for the golden promise
of high school spelling lessons.) Although
the more that one inquires, the more
the injuries do pile up–even behind the doors
of what we’d assume was the pleasant, the healthy,
the pacific. So we know, by now, the Jubilating
Gospel Hour held at the downtown church’s annual
Spiritfest, with the usual scrum of lifesize rosewood
Jesus figures rearranged for this special occasion into
a Protection Circle, along with the Bible Sing-Along
and the face painting booth…are not, I’m sorry,
palisades enough against the homemade but
horrifically effective bomb deposited
in its inconspicuous backpack in the vestibule
…and thus the ubiquitous sticky mist
of body fluids and speckles of flesh that coated
the walls and the inside of the dome, and stank of offal.
Granted: doors of the horrific may open,
equally improbably, onto joy: I choose
the church as an example because its cleanup volunteers
included Darcy and Von, who met in that hellish
sanitizing, and courted, and exactly one year later
married–there, in a complicated bliss, at the altar
they’d helped scrape blood from. And it saved her
from those earlier, darker days when “I felt
I carried my heart like a broken bird
in a paper bag in my chest.” And now when I think
of complicated bliss and complicated sorrow,
I think of this rendition (from a friend’s class)
of the myth of Cupid–who shoots, one student
hastily typed out, an arrow into our hurts.
Spell Check fails in front of such truths.
