It is the breath of benediction, yet so potent that it can give life to clay and light to darkness.
          —Crowley¹

                    i.

Your nipples are pearls making an oyster
of my mouth with heat the colour
of sand, sweat in the flesh of which I drown
every chance I get to go
down, smitten, I desire you the way dew,

syrupy as the wept milk of
crushed melons, desires the dawn to lift with
its opaline breath this humid,
turgid fluorescence of petals my
own has fallen on, a weeping

flowering of seed showering into
song, our silent season has come
and gone, sighs rising in tandem from this
garden to summon from slumber
someone more accustomed than we are to

being dreamed up only to be
spit upon, tears of rain torn from tossed veils,
false modesty humanizing
the lawless wilderness of a distant
heart’s persistent hungering ’til

your touch becomes at once both prophet and
sculptor of my tired bones’ rising
column you stroke as though, my own angel,
without removing it from your
mouth, you hold within all of my secrets

                    ii.

and yet swallow whole what no one
else will ever know, shadows reverence
its temple while your body talks
me off, speaks these undulations of ours
identifying my Self with

the sun at dusk whenever our glimpses
drop such impenitent wishes
into the same shallow well, travel mire
more than mere words can tell, aspire
no higher than to honour their fiery

ivory-whites’ basic instinct
our eyes’ lust for beauty’s power flatters,
they smile, uncross the legs of their
gazelle-thighed desire, coruscate sparkling
waterfalls of hushed laughter, and

run suicide marathons to enquire
further, collide in unified
sight, and falter, pausing, if only for
the crawl of a second thought not
yet strong enough to process what subtle

speech cannot describe, to ponder
this thirst’s flame of seasoning I possess,
falling to my knees as autumn
always reliably does, knowing full
well no god will fill a temple

                    iii.

whose mouth this beard of hubris cottons with
winter enough to chill its red
echo’s deafening chamber until this
devotion’s oiled lamps extinguish
dread luminous breath, blinding quietly

lightning flashes of such sudden,
unsolicited, unanticipated
illumination it spills
in those moments when truth happens to us,
leaving no mystery’s meaning

languishing ambiguous, no question’s
answer left unfulfilled, conquered
by what blow no euphemism can soften,
thirsting as I am ever since
my first glimpse of their parting to put my

tongue in where fingers of angels
trace whispers of a kiss, Elohim as
he whose only desire is to
be the masculine plural to your shape’s
feminine noun, to indwell as

gods must, kicking up this filth and dust of
our passion’s ashes until we
drink in what not only fills, but sobers,
us: this elixir whose cure it
is to still such restlessness with shivers.

__________
¹Aleister Crowley [The Master Therion], “Chapter IV – The Formula of Alhim, and That of Alim”, in Magick in Theory and Practice, published at Perpignan by Alicia Éditions in 2019; page 47.