There were so many tender moments

Between the thin whistles of terror

That emanated between his lips

Over a bowl of soup

At the dinner table

Where he kept his eyes closed

To avoid the judgmental stares

Of Pentecostal parents

But there was without any doubt

A divine universe

That opened up

On moonlit nights

That cast an auberge hazelnut glow

Over the rudimentary grid-like structures

Of the cemetery

Outside the church

Where his father delivered his tempestuous sermons

Hovering above the simple plot

Where his older brother was buried

Who had preceded him by a year in birth

And by thirty-seven years in death

He would gaze longingly out his window

At the silhouette made by the moon

And wonder if there would ever be

A resurrection

If there would ever come a time

When his brother would arise from the grave

And rejoin him on this ethereal plane

To fuse within him his body and mind

And recover the wholeness of the psyche

Which had been severed

By the rapture of neonatal fratricide

He would ever long to be resolved

Of his crime

Which had fractured and cast aside

The affections of his mother

And given rise to apparitions

Of lustful bodies conflating in form

Just on the other side

Of the door to the bedroom

Of his Pentecostal parents

Who had stolen from him

Any preservation of innocence

That he had clung to

As a child does

To the sagging nipple

Of his petulant mother

He had spent incandescent hours

Drawing all of his tortured malaise

Into words on a paper

The he intended to part with

From the pulpit

Of an unassuming meeting hall

Just northeast of Dover

A frolic from his assignment

As a curator for frivolous

Works of art

He had pathologically delivered

Every single future stage of his existence

Slowly through every word

As he articulated the lost serendipity

That can only be recovered

When the body is assassinated

When the soul is set free

When the crows alight from the wheatfields

When Christ

With his apostles

Slips slowly away from the altar

Of stone

On the mountain of olive trees

And accepts the fate he is delivered

By the iconoclastically clad

Roman soldiers

Who have come to march him

To his crucifixion