Opium and Opera

When the Opium wears off, my bones begin to ache at every passing breeze, my muscles succumb to gravity’s will, and my skin is a blanket of pain. When the Opera finally ends, the silence is as deafening as a drowning violin, as lonely as a lost feather floating on wandering wind, as painful as heartache and heartburn, and as uncomfortable as undersized undergarment, woven of wool, and worn not in winter, but in the stare of the summer sun. When the cakes have all been eaten and the wine has all been drunk, I’m a starving lion in a plastic jungle, I’m the insatiable leviathan sinking ship after abandoned ship, I’m the salmon who drank the river dry, I’m the sailor who swallowed the sea, and the emperor who ate the earth, country by country, from crust to core. When love has waxed cold and passion has left, winter walks everywhere and screams with each step, my lost lover’s face is seen in each breath, crystals condense on my heart and my hands, and the night is as dark as a stranger’s shadow. When my golden palace turns to lead and my silver veins bleed out, I’m a beggar at the temple gate; tattooed with sinners’ symbols, cursing in a foreign tongue; clothed in the color of a forbidden faction. I’m chief of the council of handsome statues, in a town full of bashful ghosts, with an army as weak as the quench of the sea, and whose coin is as worthless as promises. When the Opium wears off and the Opera finally ends, our reality is too real to know, the truth is too complex to comprehend, the pain goes beyond what our threshold can fathom, and the silence is as loud as death. © 2013 Jeremiah Castelo www.psalmsandpsychoses.com