For the Hairy Ones of God,
               from your Angel of the Morning—

     Dawn is a crack between worlds, the thorn-prick

of bramble-lipped mourning bristling without warning against the
flesh-melting milk-velvet of our kisses, perverting to poison
their passionate elixir’s consoling outpouring of hope, coaxing
open with burning indignation candid confessions of doubt
we clothed in silent conversations we swore on
carnal oath that only our garden’s four walls

would ever know about, a sun rising between
two thighs of reticent horizons whose confidence it
divides torments both my eyes to behold what
in my heart I always discern before it
occurs, what its brass-rimmed chorus of symbols clamours
in unhinged dirges whose sword-piercing thrust of force

refuses me to ignore your necessary return to
your own, this is why I never want
you to go, why I toss and turn
for so long, so forlorn, rolling over its
sweet sweat-singed linen as if our bed were
a scroll of hidden wisdom unfurled, desperate to

     search before the archons of day destroy with

scorched-throat voices of roaring fire its tireless words,
every inch of this prayer these crumpled sheets
record, untold desires which our bodies answered until
our mouths were sore, exertion its own reward,
‘Please,’ I plead, ‘Do not leave by that
same door on the other side of which

persists the inexhaustible hatred of the herd in
whose harsh world our kind has always been
ignored, greeted with ignorant unkindness as though we
were no more than their fears unadorned any
longer by illusion’s forms,’ ablaze with thirst for
more of you than I deserve, seraph wings

ornament my shoulders with their stinging calligraphy sentencing
our sinning season to a chilling and definitive
close, surpassing all such judgment, however, is this
obsidian unwillingness of mine to be consumed by
any light, this coldness hardening to stone the
molten moment of my heart only your warmth

     and not god’s own can make flow again.