Come, come, we've heard this before. You think, in this age, anyone cares? What we really can't forgive is a bore. You seem to believe in sin as if you'd been dunked as a boy in some red-clay river and born again. This is merely the excellent sophistry of the age: that, in our sickness, we can make of our guilt a family, and instead of the proprietary influence of stars, Orion and the Dog snarling overhead, or the Scorpion raising its tail on our birth or bridal bed, we say each disaster that assails comes simply from the primal Oedipal, Electric scene: Father, mother, child in hell. Or take this second dispensation: That in the firmament rising above a boy's masturbation, the planetary dream of a world whitened, nightmares of yellow, dark-skinned hordes, all fissioned desire, as if nothing in his nature grew naturally perverted, lecherous, wild. Your goatish glint, where did it twinkle? In the eye of mother? Father? Or guards in the towers at Minidoka, Jerome? Nonsense. Cock, bull, you made these disasters... --Yes, yes, I acknowledge my own.
		Excerpted from The Colors of Desire by David Mura. Copyright © 1995 by David Mura. Excerpted by permission of Anchor Books, an imprint of Doubleday, a division of the Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher. Photo Credit: Joyce Ravid