#sunjelly.pdf

Grant me to what ferments in the sediment of you, that which no prior gaze has exhumed.

Your eyes will be the lone apse at which I consent to genuflect. So come as my deliverance from the profane gazes, and let me behold you entire, past the frontier of reason.

Sanctify me in zealotry, and I will fix you eternal in mine.

Even the microsecond of your blinking wrenches my hands into trembling.

So hold me in your sight ; pin your eyes open and keep them on me past the dry burn, past the hot needle of the ache, until the fine red threads webbing the whites of your eyes swell and split one by one, and the blood wells up and films across the seeing surface.

Until the world buckles and runs and the last clear edges dissolve into that rising tide: until nothing is left—branded into your corneas, smoking and permanent—but me.

Upon my rebirth in your presence, I have learnt to love the world the way I venerate you. Thereupon I shall adore you, wholly and tenderly, until the stars burn out.

My love, what if I wanted to take everyone who has ever looked your way and bash their heads against the pavement ? What if I drenched their half-dead bodies in sulfuric acid to boil away their skulls, leaving the rest of the limbs to blowflies and scavenging insects ? . . . Hypothetically speaking, of course !

Look at you, trembling over a simple sliver of metal. So much for divine grace. Are all of heaven’s creatures this fragile when faced with their own making, or are you just stalling for my pity?

Press. It’s only flesh, little seraph. Even angels are meant to tear.

Sol : :( I want the forest again. The river's edge, the brown water shouldering past, to watch it carry its small freight of fish and light. I only want to be where the river is, and let it be tired for me.

i am not afraid that you will hate me. hatred would mean i am still a wound you probe with the tongue , a glomerulus of feeling that swells when touched ; hatred keeps the nerve alive.

i am afraid of the moment your eyes slide over me , nacreous and unhurried , into a larger chamber of the spiral. all while i go on existing inside you only as a callus ; clean cold stench of an interest finishing , the dishrag acridity of a fondness going to rot.

please tell me , on the days when i have no new color to show you , that you are not yet done turning toward me. ( have i bored you yet ? )