[F]or where love is concerned,
silence is always more eloquent
than words.
—Francis1
* * *
Secrets lie down for me like lovers,
my lips know how to keep them, never
saying their names again, since the pain
of being around people reminds
me of how alone I am, wanting
only him, to greet exile where I
always would rather be: in the arms
of a man who loves me without fear.
*
Tongues of angels laid on the golden
lips of saints complain of what they taste,
impurity more alluring than
hagiography’s gilded edges,
crisp pages painting irascible
sawblade haloes aglow with what I
know their true lives overshadow, dark
grit underscoring them, men nailing
other men and surviving their scars,
crucifixion no mere sentence but
a condition all suffer who know
their souls have a companion star to
which they will return when I sigh, my
words dropped like a balm onto wounds my
own thighs have worn, out of touch and out
of tune, against nature out of town
in a vineyard where fictions gather,
nightly we weep, seeding agony
in a garden where superficial
swords cut deep, matters made more complex
as we seek fathers in daddies whose
leathern bodies and more sinewy
embraces replace for us only
momentarily an emptiness
*
of moments we all feel, a cup that
never passes, fools unable to
heal our holes but more than willing to
fill up our thirsty asses, and from
within a shattering of glass sounds
heaven’s second-string of trumpets, those
unheard miracles singing off-key
of he who knocked this earth’s floor before:
my man I have sought for but whose form
eludes me, hiding from me even
in the unwashed back-alleys of my
uncensored mind, an expurgated
appendage relegating to my
life’s story a footnote having no
corresponding anecdote in its
appendix, some mystery I save
myself for, ignoring every
hand the world thrusts forward, what I am
terrified to ask for in my prayers:
a love who will not leave me, or find
shame in my poverty, and since sleep
is the death of each day’s life, I turn
thieving to fever-dreaming, digging
up worm-eaten wisdom lying there,
*
hidden somewhere beneath consciousness,
turning to those ageless sages whose
snowfall of ancient beards flows into
my ears as on wings, turning on that
faucet a gush of gossip flushes
out as though from a rush of vultures,
thick voices idyllic, Delphic, and
oracular, whispering of what
fate I very well could make today,
if only I took into my heart’s
treasury these sacred parts of me
I let strangers take, yet the greatest
literary teacher is pain, and
when people know nothing about you,
you can tell them whatever you want
and they will believe it, so until
my hoard of gnosis acquaints me with
my apotheosis I will wait,
making do with mourning’s powder-dew
erasing loneliness from my face,
tooling hurt into burning verse I
lay on the lips of saints who eat sin,
animating them with a scalding
of hot chronicles honesty pens.
__________
1Pope Francis, “Chapter One: In the Light of the Word, [Section One:] You and Your Wife”, paragraph 12, in Post-Synodal Apostolic Exhortation[,] Amoris Lætitia[,] of the Holy Father Francis to Bishops, Priests and Deacons[,] Consecrated Persons[,] Christian Married Couples[,] and All the Lay Faithful[,] on Love in the Family, Città del Vaticano [Vatican City]: Libreria Editrice Vaticana [Vatican Publishing House], 2016; page 10. Written on March 19, 2016 and published simultaneously on April 8, 2016 in the Arabic, English, French, German, Italian, Polish, Portuguese, and Spanish languages.
Jono Borden 