Amor Vincit Omnia

I was a scholar in those days and I learnt all the wrong things. Though, who's to say? The value of knowledge should never be misjudged.

It was evening when the truth came to light. And the moon, so bright yesterday disappeared like the lover who once made me devotional.

He and his God abandoned, With mine distant—

the state of faith, dire.

Grief, profound and spent, embroidered into each blue hour. Nearly three decades in this world, unraveling into a ribbon of ice as violence climbs up the spire and rings the bell.

Does the spark exist anymore? I know it isn't a dream because I once—no, twice felt it riving its way through my heart with white hot intensity The time when man could bring me to tears has passed Now men in their myriad ways twist the knife revealing the corrupt world at its core

but I believed in the wrong loves and an absent God and now I doubt my heart's ability to emerge from the deepest hibernation Oh, to feel something stir in the night—

As the year neared its silent end I went back for the missing black glove at the risk of missing a train I lost its gray sister in Gdansk by the charity shop across from the central station I like to think they are together even when apart

-After Rene Char

Our inheritance was left to us by no testament, our sorrows by no thorns, as threads untangle down the tree, one can’t help but feel forlorn.

Tradition has the power to strangle,  authority may kill, and failed revolutions may break the heart,  more than the status quo ever will.

The wages of your wonder may wither into dust. The lust for life you once had, shrivels into mistrust.

There is no home without door  or window, no home without some way  for the Other to  breach the threshold,  without some way to let the world in, & yourself out— there must always be  the possibility of passage.

What of your heart? —

The way it flouts the force of law, & flaunts the violable borders of its spacious four chambers

The way it commits the crime of hospitality and refuses to name that which is dearest to it.

Who resides there? — Parasitic phantom ordained in a confessional faith that encroaches endlessly, turning a space of love into a settler-colonial project, forcing you to speak in a language that is not your own, turning you from host to guest in your own body.

Sometimes a cigarette is an eclipsed expectation / a way of saying If a slightly charred lung is the price to pay for warm conversation in the cold, I will gladly pay it.

Sometimes a fucker like that man is your stark raving mad accomplice

—in beating a dead horse 

—in fashioning sordid fantasies of a deflowering that leaves you without petals for armor

—in clean wiping out the line between  wrath and mercy

Sometimes he’s just creeping around with no intention to leave it alone.

But if you had seen your reflection, you might have found the story of a wilted woman etched crystal clear into the cracked glass pane /

a painful reminder of:

— being overcome by a sudden desire as your feet bled in golden heels in the graduate lounge

—simmering on the bed above with him in a white undershirt below —passing the archways of Lincoln Centre Theatre,  before sending him a message that read,  Please comma don’t go period

(The punctuation is important).

Sometimes, it’s good to be the bigger person, but sometimes you just want to feel his hands go down,

Just beyond the tracery of filigree masks, eyes reveal a new poetic of relation set in tempo rubato & tempered by

—the cruel sensuality of a moonlit Brooklyn night,

—the caprice of a fairytale waltz dancing still at the satin edges of memory

—the starry heavens above & the moral law within.

If this is to be my legacy, let it be.

A cloud offers me a choice in a cup— I am decanted between worlds, my pigment sloshes over figmented hands, lost in a polarity of spirit.

Can only call it a day when I have ostensibly stirred the cup, pot —turning my heart into a bisque fit for consumption.

The conversation of the I with itself flows nowhere, leaves me restless— if there was ever a time for magic, it would be now

—when the chips are down —when the cards imply   that the water under the bridge runs red with bad blood, and I am so deeply immersed in a beloved grudge, I’ve lost sight of the surface.

So much liquid, so little courage— I am in dire need of a friendship  that can only come from within—

Plato says one cannot live with a murderer in the mind, but is this vindictive Virgo virago much better?

My spite spills over into the hip flask of memory, washing out the taste of times & trains past.

I. 

Entire lifetimes were spent warning you of the seducers. How they would come, those poor, misguided servants of blue deities, to tempt you into ways, truths, and lives that would only ruin you. They could strike at any time: with their low-cut black blouses and expensive cameras. You might find yourself sitting across a kitchen island from one on a barstool in the Heights, drinking Moscato by moonlight. Faced with one of these she-demons in the flesh, you might be cajoled to give up rewards in Heaven for Hell on Earth. Faced with color, you might feel your whiteness more intensely than ever before.

II.

Always remember your humble origins in sin. If the Grand Concourse is Eden after the fall, and Eve is a brown girl transformed by the fruits of knowledge, then know that you—Adam—have been enticed away from all that is good. Think of the apple lodging itself in your throat; the forbidden re-molding the very contours of your body. Think carefully now about the sanctity of marriage. Think about the salvation of your soul from the bitterness of contamination—a bitterness so acute that maybe, just maybe, God’s command to love gets lost somewhere in the taste of it all.

III.

Forget about the women who bare everything for you on glowing laptop screens. Forget about egging on drunken unholiness. Forget about stripping the spark naked. Stash it all away and build a cathedral of guilt in the open field of your mind. Fall to your knees and worship at the altar of lust. In clear tones, advise silly girls not to offer non-committal men perks. They only do so at their own peril.

(You like the fifties. It was a better time.)

IV.

Will philosophy provide you the answers you seek? Fat chance.

Whenever you stray, turn back towards your roots, and allow them to wind through the back alleys of your heart.

The heart is always some kettle on the verge of exploding onto the brine-soaked tile of the aortic kitchen.

Always some kettle filled to the brim with dark brew & dark magic, promptly deconstructed into stained steel & spells.

Some kettle boiling, blood-bending, committing to memory the intricacies of language & identity, of poetics of relation past.

Kettle Vessel—no, ark—to hold both commencement & commandment—

The beloved organic archive of man & myth vein & veil—