This Isn’t a Ritual
“She reads Moses and says her love is crucified.”
i.
A tongue sent on a perilous errand ends
each kiss with a bite, exhausting
knots of irony unburnish the blurring unfurling of
future-proofed pearls, kings buried under waterfalls,
waiting to become gods, awaken as flawed angels
faith accosts and appalls, flowering in
and out of bed, seven-headed and libidinal, emerge
purged as wormwooded West End Girls
ii.
at World’s Edge, deadended in this perpetual pit
of distress attesting Antarctica is the
underworld of the planet, hauling weapons-grade religious relics,
we are the gods our polluted
love of loss sculpted from the accident of
not knowing our Selves carved into
us more than once, no reason, just because,
an aching sustainable level of ancient
iii.
heartbreak watering my dead orchids with pain soluble
in art, Repeating (y)our Self like
a Winchester Rifle under a mirrored ceiling, the
sacrifice at the orchard’s core implores
us at once to face this faithlessness unaided,
to grip its knife by the
serrated edge, hewn in the dark nude of
steepled fingers charisma ensues, consumes with
iv.
slant kindness an inching vision of what embrace
undoes, incites in an instant an
uncoupling, unwanting the once-was to room in its
emptied tomb two truths thumbs never
touch, not when fingers do their lingering best
to extinguish rude libidos, as fists
crush throats before kisses can be swallowed below
lips death touches as though, punishes
v.
as if, he were allowed to strangle from
us his gift, the unpunished vice
is getting away with discovering a new one,
in a fit of furious congress,
mercantile love goes on to get off killing
itself, purchases freedom the way any
suicide does, touching on something else unwritten, trickling
out of existence an echo wept
vi.
into a glass cloud erases, tells through television
skin bruises glisten, the hue of
freezer burn, that what truth rots beneath returns,
it’s murder in absentia, burning pictures
of her on this altar, desire’s our hunger’s
daughter called here where we meet
in the overwhelm, Ishtar’s wished-for fathers darkening temple
thresholds, when jerking off feels like
vii.
eating fast food, you move in the gloom
like a white flower surrounded by
flesh and led to where what I find
beautiful offends almost accidentally, the way
atheists may savour in the insult of an
unbeliever’s assault on the name of
another’s pissed-on saviour, confessional as an understall flamer
playing limbo thrusting deeper beneath a
viii.
toilet paper dispenser, piano fingering some imagined stud,
in not out of a rut
then out of it, in pursuit of love’s
antithesis, that ship sailed and sank
ages ago, the way shadows give breath to
statues, ritual sin, you don’t believe
but do you understand? a heart’s assault a
result every time romance’s artlessly offensive.
