a collaboration with the extraordinary @thegoblinbeeÂ
We dream you up in the dusk beneath a retreating sun, or else in the dead of night, all alone in our beds.
We thread you through the eye of our needle to stitch you into another stanza, to lay you down
in another line, looping you ‘round our wrists, binding you to us, hoping to tie you up in knots.
This our rite, our ritual, a high hallelujah dug up from the pit of us,
a sweet sacrament, an offering from our pulpits:
Let us sew your melancholy to our memory,
measuring out the shadows of your past,
tailoring our longing to the shape of you,
Let us cloak your closeness
with our candied skin
that we may embody you,
growing fearsome and large
as the great day sinks.
We yearn to wear
and be worn,
to be witnessed;
twin ink planets
converging to embrace you,
blotting out the sun.
We descend on you from the id of roses,
making our oaths in blood, setting to carry you off.
Our hunger rages lustily all around you, beats back the wind
that dares chap your immaculate kiss.
Ardently, we lunge for you, shoving away continents,
stumbling sloppily to feel the soft of your skin.
It is a dire situation, this dastardly craving, this craven need.
We draw the four corners of the world up around us like a quilt,
insulating your siren song, ocean’s depths spilling over the sides,
drowning in your sugar-salted seas.
Not a lot can stop us now, love – We’ve found you somehow
in the midst of all this madness and deafness and greed
and now we must erect our altars at your feet.
We venture ever-onward to earn you, writing our psalms on your skin in spit and by fingertip,
pleading that you may love us alive, allow us to live long in your exquisite grace,
breathe your breath into our lungs that we might speak in your voice,
exalted above the coarse and simple everything-else.
Drop a kiss in our collection plate and watch us falter, bend, wilting into the night.
Self-warring leviathans, we await your imminent retreat.
We offer no explanation to you, except that we have no choice.
If we must be temporary, we will be tempests,
turning all teacups into teeming ravines.
So forgive us this, our transgressive ache, our interminable need.
Forgive us our unraveling hems, our endlessly-unfurling confessions
dribbling from our mouths like wine.
Forgive us Father, forgive us Mother, forgive us High and Holy Ghost.
Take us down to the water, baptize us all along the coast.
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