He ‘Oughta Be Opal 

Kelly Quick

They say he ‘oughta be opal

And all a-soul reckoned so

He swirled, a shimmering propagate of charm

Oh, the places he’d go

Though sweltering suns dared 

Above their furnace, he forged his tenure

The daylight doted on his grace,

Gave life to amorphous splendor

With his work, he sparked flames

Lit lanterns, adrift to dusky skies

Brought life to darkened days

A kaleidoscope to one’s eyes

His silent, animated smile

A wave of a satin-clothed hand

A blazing fire feasting on wind

Roaring in triumph—vibrancy from hued sheets of sand

His illuminating iridescence, 

Not a crystalline scaffold to obey

As calmly fits a palace in a basket,

One heeds his bounding display

To his brothers, he brought wonders,

His honey-trickled clutch

His beautifully sweet harmonies

That blossom at the touch

To his home, he blessed beauty,

Gems and jewels strung abound,

Silk draped on muralled walls,

And quaint lullabies they do sound

And from within the light of laughter, 

in speckled leather boots,

trudged in kinship’s sugar-bliss,

He walked.

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But from behind curtains of eyes, he stared;

a whispering of thought—

a ruminating impaired—

A maundered soliloquy of a softened, whispered dream

Swept away from ambitious talk,

His reach abandoned in bazaars

Before his eyes, he donned mirrors,

So they thought too he saw the stars

Night left him a crazed shadow

Dawn encroached with deposits of dread

Carved for luster like a desert rose,

That left his soul unwed

Words scattered in serpentine courses

An elusive reality to clasp

His undertakings saw him a visitor;

His pen rest not within his grasp

Stood before his house of many years,

He met its apprehensive gaze

The door dared him in jaded scrutiny

He unlocked it in criminal haze 

He lurked forth, automatic 

Making way his piecemeal path

An amalgam of youth eroded,

He cowered from abrasive wrath

Jewels dangled from the ceiling,

pondering his name with every subtle gape

Past the foreign eyes of ones he loves,

To a bed long forgotten his shape

And snug deep within his hollow, little home,

He slept.

And allochromatic, his mind mistaken

The basal cusp of what stood true

It was unnatural, what lay beneath

An infant’s growth without review

It was what he stole, not what he sheathed,

From the lungs of a child,

Never from a child, breathed

And from a world to be observed

before his eyes of green,

Never, from green eyes, colored pretty and seen

And from a heart of whom beats,

A diffusion of silenced need,

Never given, once and for all, a meager chance to bleed

And shallow, in temple

The cornered crevasse of the mind

Met not with his melody,

Nor memories to bind

Never within a life skull-pent

Could he forge conchoidal repairs

Flora of skin lay miles a-past

Bearing fictive prairies of hairs

His bones but commodious caverns, 

Mottled and hollow and fissured,

His limbs—marionettes of veins,

With mere comical commissures

A war waged within the form

Gory details ripped and torn

Lost from interest of remoted skies

An escapade of termination

And from above this toiling sea of flesh and blood,

He sang.

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Returning home, he found his body roaming streets

Akin to a buffet and store

Who would be his cutlery, this time around

To dinners he could stomach no more?

He ventured to the cornerstone

To find warm welcomes from a woman in gray

The polite motion of the crowd awoke him

Had she truly remembered his name?

Upon chiseled stone, diffracted sunlight danced

Vines bled along columns in rapport

With greeting passersby, he smiled quietly to himself,

And wondered, dreadfully, if he’d been here before.

It was the amorphous thought, muddled whim

Drinking life’s nectar as epochs raced by

Perhaps it was that he never learned to swim

His poor soul reckoned he could fly

He abandoned clarity 

for peace of mind,

and a turbid conscience

turned him blind

While he lived a mere means

for light to pass through,

not weight nor even form 

could borne him anew 

His orientation 

his icy disease

keeping him lucid 

at the notion of breeze

He need not gall.

When thrown within a spiral,

Would he fly, or could he fall?

Should he take another step, 

Would his heel meet the floor at all,

Or would he fly, 

Or would he fall?

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Alas, at twilight, he was found

Before a guilty creek absconds,

With hands from gloves they held him tall

Muttering hardly a response

He knew the cold embrace of palms

Fleeting, as always, to last

Meant soon to take the chilling plunge

To bitter days en masse

And sure, with that, they neared the shore

To bid farewell, the end

To the drunken summer’s amity haul

To their faceless pebbled friend

The young boy dropped him after all

He kissed the water, brisk and cold

Before losing the mind he’d desperately brawled;

A sepulcher foretold.

From the watery scene he bore the smolders of his tale

Dragged under the weather—

Swept with the stream—

With the asphalt and diamonds—

He whispered

He dreamed