In a living Stations of the Cross, I walk.
I carry the cross of my decisions:
for choosing to live life like a Shakespearean play,
for choosing to render it into poetry on this page.
Sentenced to death for rescuing
a heart in flames.
They do not know that:
if I do not put into words the blood that poisons me,
my body will become a home to necrosis.
A crown of thorns upon my waves:
a scarlet cascade bathes my brow, my cheeks.
I stick out my tongue to taste my poison:
the sweetness of madness, love, and nostalgia
flow into a red sea at my feet.
Each lash life deals me
is another elegy, another romance.
If three times I fell with my cross,
three thousand times I turned it upside down
with rituals of rhyme and allegory.
Until it cracked against my back
and I was condemned to the stake.
My trust, my hopes, lacerated
by lukewarm, tasteless-blooded Pharisees;
incapable of savoring the wine
distilled by my words, my heart:
“Take and drink from it, all of you, for this is the chalice of my blood,
the blood of the new and eternal covenant,
which will be poured out for you and for many
for the forgiveness of sins.”
The blood was poured out,
but not down their throats.
It was me, my death sentence at dawn,
and the chalice of my blood spilled across these pages.
Redeemed by my own venom,
forgiven for the sin of loving the damn neighbor:
the traitorous Judas who kissed me, my loves Annas and Caiaphas;
those bastards, never again.
The new and eternal covenant is with myself.
Do this in memory of me.
Crucified upon my tombstone, in my poems,
my pyre blazes and bursts into flames;
my voice reincarnated in free verse;
my life’s contradictions in oxymoron;
and my way of loving, in a blood-soaked hyperbole.
My flesh reduced to ashes, but never my soul.
Dead — but not to save my executioners;
rather to save myself.
To save my word from death
and resurrect it with me, every dusk.
On the night of Easter Sunday,
my body levitates and dances with death.
Nights are for poetry to become archaism:
to revive my throbbing catharsis;
to revive the achrony of a kiss to my faithful, departed love.
Nights are for stepping out of my coffin
and becoming free verse in the air.
Photography by Eliza Trejo // Dev/Scan at Fotograma Film Lab
