Cosmetic Relief Victor Marrero 1 Some never make it. Others do. The rest of the cast, so-called survivors, preserve the mold, endure life’s raw ordeals. Here and now, where twilight is just another twilight, the relicts relate, nonchalant, held in one piece by a pinch of nerve, by smoke and mirrors. All cosmetic relief. Their own remains wear on and off, marred and null, day in, day out, all ides steeped in time like the trickle in the hourglass. Grand intrigues of disparities and deceits and misrepresentations pay deadly homage to the grind. Is it all just the fill of reality by reality? What else want? How else be? The mystery outlasts the quest, exhausts imagination. 2 Science fiction and fables and faith’s born-again nostrums report ready-made cures replete with convenient sightings. Like a snow peak rising in a desert plain. Now you see it. Now you see it again. Here you see it double, even if not there. Only the end of time and oracles untested bear true witness to the dimensions of heaven. Troublesome because it is unfinished, life’s fellowship of slaves lives on as it fancies: if blank, in quest of design, if bound, astir for release. By the dumb glare of the real, it is all unreal. 3 This cadence of blank verse cannot sustain the sputter of an ancient clock as it unwinds. All alarms are ringing. The purple heart’s gears throb in retreat. The barometer fails to gauge our blood’s impulse stuck in reverse. And holiness nostrums oversell the wonders of other-world bounties held past the expiration of warranties. The downward spiral of things. Life surges earthbound to the pull of gravity, rolling like a tide drawn by a droll face of the moon, receding between ebb and more ebb.
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