Jewel Thief Movie

I was so happy in the gem room.

The sun was president, I was just

dug up, all hell had shrunk

to a sulphur crystal. Something danced

on the point; it must have been me.

I had a hundred faces, and one of them

served up the ceiling in a perfect slice — 

like a twelve-year-old saint

in some countryside where they only

read Revelation. I had some small

nugget of sense, for once, I was a mind

that understood the light    ...    

Rain rained in my aquamarine.

The world’s knuckles gripped the bedstead.

I felt the red dynamiting of me in Missouri,

where all outdoors was my candy store,

where color sucked at its all-day self

and never became less sweet, less

new. “I want to put it in my mouth,”

said someone, “I almost want to eat it    ...    ”

I had dozens of uses, but I was mostly

flat beautiful. Visitors just gasped

in the matte-black room where I freely

fluoresced. They saw me laid on a dictionary

to demonstrate my transparency,

which was complete; they could read the word

everything through me.

My name meant blood, meant seawater,

meant lemon. The eye in my agate

never blinked. I was believed to be formed

of frozen moonlight. I was cut so that a star

shone back. The purest and wind-clearest

hunk of me they carved into a horse.

When I was split to the purple and somehow still

standing, they called me a cathedral.

Yet just to the left of that

I spilled all over velvet.

The velvet is what did it — 

I wanted to be smuggled.

Wanted to ride past all the alarms,

just before that drop of sweat hit

the floor. Wanted to end up in god-

knows-whose hands, a heist.

“Obscene,” said a man behind me,

“just in piles like that    ...    obscene.”

Then I spilled another carat, laughing.

In Missouri you could pluck me

straight up off the ground. Gumdrops,

gobstoppers, jujubes. I thought:

try to suck me down to nothing,

and find yourself up against one

million years. In piles like that.

Just out there. For anyone. Obscene.

The legs of the real thing were

opening, flash and flash and flash.

I said: go ahead and smash the glass.

Give me a break-in like a kaleidoscope.

Someone will entirely drip with me

as soon as I get out of here.