das rheingold

THe Full POEM,

“Stairs Toward the Sky Lead to Sin”

i believe in the opera. 

that the gold at the bottom of the river awards even the ugliest, most horrific of monsters.

that it can marry us to this city in a divine unilateral moment of love. 

but my brutish nightmares tell me something more sinister crawls across that riverbed.

that the sirens don freakish faces and acrylic claws to protect us not only from the precious metal,

but from ourselves.

the hudson river reeks of the lost children and the feces lodged down their throats. 

decades of sickness which festers beside an ever stratified island of decadence and despair. 

the un and over fed produce a unique waste that both kills and transforms. 

every night i dare to sleep, my nightmares fling me into the water

as moonlight shines between my ever reaching fingers and 

my limbs flutter, kick, and stroke my body in a progression to nowhere at all. 

directionless-ly forward, i march.

suspended in opulent filth and shit. 

at the bottom, 

white gloves replace the skin on my arms, 

a gown becomes me, 

a princess is born. 

she wears a crown, decorated with precious jewels that her subjects can peek through and into. 

and beyond the warped glass,

they can see themselves in her.

and all they will ever gain from her dutiful abandon. 

from her unchecked ambition. 

her amnesia. 

liberation. 

she claws at an unopened chest 

an insatiable dream, a reminder of familial failure even in taken opportunity.

a never-fulfilled promise to forget that i was someone before i dove.