[W]here he portrays himself—or rather his heart—as a kidnapped virgin crying out for a virile liberator.
          —Paglia¹

                    i.

In a garden of incense-bearing trees, burning.

                    ii.

Besought by enemies on all sides and
enveloped in the Logos, despite their attempts
at fright—enamoured of being enarmoured in
words of my own design, versifying my
flight from impending demise!

                    iii.

You do realize
your voice feels as velvet does when
it caresses listeners’ ears, right? Hearing you
tastes like ayahuasca flavoured with tears, and
resembles when eyes close the glint of
sunset reflected in the scales of a
corn snake basking in a desert of
pink sand.

                    iv.

Within, an absence of weather.
Armed only with letters, words tor(r)(m)ent. Walking
between the worlds, this knot is a
door. A tangling together of two souls
no sword can puncture or sever. Too
severe, too secure to seek being succored
by another’s illusion’s purchased force, we retain
our energy until untied. Until new day’s
nude light unbinds what, in the echo
of night, our union realized. Beading sweat
like a rosary, we need to be
destroyed to be saved. Strangled by faith
in what follows life to survive.

                    v.

South
of seven, numberless endings rise. Counting on
beginning nothing but becoming gods in arithmetical
eyes where adding tears combines grief with
what is mourned, what is expected with
what never arrives. Closure only an opened
mind can devise in a bedroom prison
the size of depression at a time
when lying about melancholy thrives. Loss a
lesson only we can revise. Conflating erection
with resurrection, touch revives what destruction, dismissive
of our paired resilience, denies. Defiled in
the fuck, we find our Selves deified,
unlike everyone else.

                    vi.

“An artwork, in other
words, is the fossil of an idea.”²

                    vii.

The exposed corpse of a love expressed!

__________
¹Camille Paglia, “[Chapter] Six[:] John Donne, Holy Sonnet XIV” in Break, Blow, Burn, published at New York by Pantheon Books in 2005; page 31.
²Ibidem, “[Chapter] Thirty-Nine[:] Chuck Wachtel, ‘A Paragraph Made Up of Seven Sentences’” in the same volume and edition as cited above; page 206.