When my heart danced in childish glee
You took it by the hand and led it to a high mountain
Where you could be alone.
Trapped in my ribcage, famished, using my insides as playthings
The child that never grew up, and never would was enticed
Innocent he wasn’t and knew where you led him:
A path it had been before yet forgotten where it led.
All upon a night when the moon’s bosom lactated white, drinking its
Cold, serene breeze from your cupped hands.
Your pale skin’s constellation of beauty spots coyed as the sky’s nocturnal tenderness clarified into morning void.
Curiosity fluttered restlessly as butterflies drinking nectar from bouquets of flowers,
Tame and wild, sweet and pungent,
Sauntering by the path the berceuse rhyming on your hips,
And the kisses your soles left cicatrized in the tender dew-kissed wild grass.
Your silk tresses caressed by the warm wind’s long, bristly fingers
Sung along with us the madrigals of newborn spring.
You hid a blade in your smile, its cold sharp in the blush of your cheek—
A peninsula glistening unyielding sterling—
Licking your lips, aiming for mine, you redirected their tranquilizing toward my forehead,
Unsheathing the knife with the sweetest honey
Of surprise, mightier than the pen and the sword, the word that proceeded out of your mouth—
Creator of all, the beginning of us, the end of me.
The tip pricked my skin puckered: I held it as you pulled away,
You didn’t seem to care anymore, whether I lived only for you, or died to love,
It was a sin that consumed without fill, where desire and the body were one and the same.
I sat on a broad stone and you fed me a host lit with promises and lies,
Scorching down my throat as you lay me down on its smooth, cold, eternal death;
Baited breath, braided grip, we butt the handle ‘til it dripped— teaching me to accept its full girth
Every time I stole a glimpse of your guarded stare.
You slid it slowly in between my ribs with the sweetness of your laughter,
My blood fell on the ground as great drops of sweat beading
Dripping off your forehead,
Tears of happiness reservoired in the corners of your eyes,
Tissue destroying tears, invisible scars, invincible stars,
Of joy and pleasure, carving me a solstice out of my own flesh where the sun could bathe our naked bodies to sleep.
Only, you didn’t feed its vigor into my traitorous, infantile organ, but
Wrenched it out, bubbling purple, gurgle black
Mocking the stone’s wrinkles, trickling of the sacrificial altar,
Clotting clay with powdered red earth, blood,
Sweat caracolled into beautiful irises of wounding burgundy.
I reached for the elusive blade— an amputee’s itch for lost arms, reminiscing the touch of his own face,
Regretting never touching yours—
Beginning to miss the pain of your absence.
You pranced on the path you had tramped for one,
One unlike me, flowers blooming shivers on my sunburnt back, and honey out of every pore,
Consumed by strange birds and rodents, emanating from olive trees
Disfigured, as bruised hands breaking free from the earth,
Pebbling the ground with olives rainbowed by sunlight.
I beg, prostrate, palming my way off the rock to kiss your feet
Even as I withered away in the slender shadow of your violence;
The destruction of kissing your lips— feeling always as sweet as the
Pain of when they first enlaced and ripped apart,
Nothing compared to my blood’s rapturous departure, peeling itself out of my veins and from my bones
Running off and draining itself from me as a fountain into a sea of red.
Kill the child within, my heart— Abraham fulfilling the will that a cruel god plunged deep into his soul,
To hurt that which he loved most—
The one who still enjoys the violence of falling prey to love,
Who prays it so in the delight of his eyes.
It must die so that what remains can bloom to be a man:
Kill it before it dies on its own.
Before it kills me.
Photo Credit
Photo by Shopify from Burst
