They carried you and never let your feet touch the ground, like a king
or a sacrifice. You were both. Thousands of devotees followed you and their
keening chased those who held you captive. Ahead of you, thousands of opposers
waited with wet tongues and eager hands wringing for your blood.
They found me where I stood lamenting with your mother
and they knew me. They called me a whore for the first time
to my face, as if your fall from grace had pulled away a veil and revealed
the travesty that is and always will be my love for you. Their hands were not gentle
as they shoved your crown in my hands and made me kneel.
My kneecaps made bowls in the dirt as your crown bit my knuckles
and made my hands shake. My fingers entwined with warped stems
of decapitated roses. A thorn broke off in the crease of my thumb.
They held my head in place and as I extended my arms
they were a mile long. I placed your crown against your forehead,
and it drew its votive from the soft skin at your temples which tightened
like you wanted to say something and from some incorporeal
place you mother screamed, my god my god why have you forsaken me?
They swung you up and tightened your body to your coffin and I fell back,
my body borne backward through the crowd as if stabbed through
with a nail of its own, a pinprick moving mountains, pushed and pulled into the fray.
I tripped on my own feet. Lines of raucous people became the frothing anger
of crashing waves while I became the ceaseless undertow.
I supplicated and my kneecaps struck the dirt as they condemned you,
not with words but with teeth, crying like beasts and reaching like babies they beat
incessantly against the cracking protection of the way they used to laugh at you.
I wove my fingers together and asked for your salvation from a father who I no longer
believe can save any of us.
