Moderation
My mother used to quote Oscar Wilde:
“Everything in moderation, including moderation.”
It was a paradox I would chew on,
how an idea could negate itself and be universal at once.
It was okay to vomit after binging on gin and tonics,
to eat a pint of cookie-dough ice cream
before sobriety and dieting,
be a jungle one day, a desert the next.
My body, perfumed with a bestial odor,
climbs a vine of a strangler fig,
unburies a tiny frog and sets it on a fern.
The forest vows many visits,
how it swings into me with simian fingers.
I collect all its rain in my basin,
call it holy water,
cross myself with desire.
Yet the desert calls.
It is beckoning me with its bed of nails.
Saguaros stand sentry,
cracked sand burns into glass
to fashion a mirror from a sun
belching fire and brimstone
which reveals my cocoon of a body,
how closed like a doll in a trunk.
I fill cornucopias with bananas and cacti.
I fill pages with sore knees from supplication
and torn flags of discipline
and lands with colors and shadows of bodies,
immoderate as the devil,
leveled as a slate of wood
laid down as a foundation
on the border of two lands
I can never call my own
though I will eat all their bounty
for the rest of my life
like a silent, naked monk
alone in the dark.
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