Beauty

[heslopian]

As a child I was obsessed with depravity.
Read every article I could
on handgun wielding sons of Sam
and hippies, bored with bongs and sex,
making piñatas from pregnant women.
My internal library was soaked
with blood and entrails, young ladies
screaming in the night,
child snatchers, angry cops.
The endless dark enshrouded me.
having grown and suffered
since then, my personal trek
through the landscapes of hell
hardly even begun, I've learned to love
the simple things. Red sour sauce
on a ball of battered chicken, the way
a lamppost impregnates a puddle,
the perfect, compact loveliness
of a face or a thigh or an arse.
All this beauty and I - ill, depressive,
angry, scared - must learn to snatch
these images, store them like nuts
so when I die my internal library
will shimmer, blossom, then burst into light.