Sir Galahad

I fear that love has gone
the way of Santa Clause
and the Easter Bunny--
the dreamstuff
of naive little girls
and sweet sixteens
who read too much Jane Austen;
the eternal and futile work
of sisyphus, ephemeral
as a spring crocus bloom
or autumn foliage.

You were my Lancelot
and I the Lady, doomed
when first I looked away
from my tapestry
for what mortal can live up
to such legends?

The electric tingle
when lips first touch,
a nip on my ear
that I feel down to my toes,
sunbeams in a mere glance
sit on a bench
beside the tooth fairy
and Jesus, and the goodness
of mankind;
filed away somewhere
behind a tab labeled,
"Perhaps, but not likely."

I watched a movie
and cried, not when
the little girl's mother dies,
but when she told
her daughter in anger
and frustration to stop
beleiving in fairy-tales,
years of jaded disappointment
in her voice, and tears
in her eyes.

I saw a film in class
about Christ's figure
appearing in a tortilla
and the Virgin Mary's
on the fender of a Camaro.
How beautiful
to beleive like that.
I once saw ripples
in a puddle behind the railroad tracks
and swore it was a faerie
splashing about
like a fat little sparrow
in a birdbath.

Does my cynicism doom me
to non-belief,
or my non-beleief
doom me to cynicism?
Or was it that blind faith
that condemned me from the start?

Perhaps another
could have happenned by
as I glanced away from
my mirror and through
that fateful window.
We take this or that path
and the fates switch the color
of their thread.

My tapestry seems
a tangled mess
and my inner damsel longs
for a valiant knight
to unbind me from my loom,
but my inner skeptic
says, "what for?
to be tossed in a saddlebag
and ride off into a sunset
of disappointment?"