Byzantium

  In darkness I swam to your golden locks where heaven is my new home and the stars ripped it apart like the muezzin call that drizzled its blessed fairy tale on my beaten body, broken and bruised in all the places that cursed prison denied my freedom. And you put your hands on them every day as I swam to your smiling face shining through the clouds while I couldn't move, just feel relief that there were still beautiful things in this world that God had abandoned for the wicked hearts of men. Slowly your tender touch worked over me, melting my aches into the redeeming curves of your dress where I surrendered to survival, for I couldn't give up, not after all I'd been through, not after the care you put into healing me. My eyes opened after days submerged in the foggy ocean that tortures rendered black to hear them praying for my resurrection under the dim stars poking through the veil separating the surface from your kiwi eyes. And when I spoke to you it surprised you so much that you ran off to fetch the physician, returning with a light in your eyes so buoyant that the roof of my soul came off, exposing my nakedness to the joy in your heart. He's alive, you shouted, he's alive, you broadcast to the evening masses as twilight erupted their contained anxiety to shake the earth of relief. Praise Allah, you cried into the night, a golden sight, the shape that didn't seem real, the face that fooled me into thinking I was dead and gone to a better place, the place where angels who had been watching over me my whole life welcomed me to the internal dance through healing. And what a sight you were when the celestial light in your eyes glazed over the corners of all the ice in my muscles thawing the pain that left me paralyzed crawling past the edges, into my organs unfolding like some magic carpet levitating my cold bones off the bed and into your arms. Sweet Arabian nun, never leave my side, see me through the rest of the tumult, show me what it means to be a man. And I lost consciousness again but this time I knew I'd be okay, that you wouldn't let me slip away, that all those poems I devoted to God on my trip to Byzantium would be recited, etched into my memory until I fully awoke. And the silence you spent with me was a confession of apostasy in which the literature metamorphosized into psalms of love rather than the Almighty. With you I release all I held sacred for the glory of love, a power more divine than all the bells and all the domes and all the sermons and all the crosses swept across that old continent into the dust bins of time.