https://youtu.be/SdXX45Ec4lo

Voice Over: Val Cole

POEM:

Holy water smells like fresh herbs
or maybe it was the older women in the back pews
with the flower laced hats, and rosemary scented skin.
Skin so thin, the stained glass saints
stained the paper thin veins.
I didn’t like church much as a child
it reminded me of death,
and I didn’t like heaven much,
eternity sounded too endless for any curiosity to live there.
And what about the tigers?
Would I see tigers in heaven?
I heard a poem once about a tiger
who lived in a forest
ate belladonna
flossed his teeth with wolfsbane
taunted death in a game of catch and release.
And if God made the tiger
tigers must somehow be immortal too.
The young priest swung a golden thurible
past the elderly ladies in the back pews,
chanting over the burning ash of frankincense.
His monotone throat bass commenced a parade
and the downpour of eternal happiness
(without the promise of death)
marched in my mind.
What is eternity anyways to a child?
A perpetual summer dipped in delicious fields of technicolor tiger lillies.
I want to stay where lavender dies
in a place tigers are natural born killers
licking their cubs with chunks of meat between their God made teeth,
where in the back pews childhood philosophies dissolve in colors of glass saints.