“You bastard!” she screamed. “You’re trying to mar my beauty!”

My Catholic grandmother once told me that experience was a   

                            punishment from God.  She believed a lot of things,

some crazy, some not so crazy.  We argued often and for many reasons,

two being because she believed

                                               chicken was not meat, and that "colored" was

           an appropriate term to describe people.  However, a St. Anthony

                                  pendant

                                                still hangs from my rear

               view because she believes I need him. 

She would often tell me, over flat lemon lime soda and store bought

                                         shortbread cookies,

                         that God was angry with us,

that he'd been so from the very beginnng.  By merely living we were

                                         putrefying our innocence.  She said these

experiences

                                               recoiled back to the very moment of birth, and that every breath

                                thereafter was direct

                                     negation of incorruptibility and virtue.  From each

idyllic kiss seeks

                                                derision and virulence. 

Little murders, she called them. 

                          For every experience

we murder innocence, and once

                                                          depleted comes specious light,

                         knowing no boundaries

                                         or repose.