Canticles of The Forbidden Feasts

By the grace of shadows, by the grace of locked rooms, I am impudent enough to breathe the name of you on the page. That breathing comes not like the scribe's ink, but in a procession of censers swung low enough to spill molten incense that burns the eyes and fills the lungs with sweetness. I cannot write to you like a courtier to his patron, or an educator to an inspiration; our language is limited by the constraint of speaking kindly. This is not correspondence; they are the garments of a liturgy performed in private, the unctuousness of my surrender, poured one drop at a time into the chalice of your emptiness.

You are the delirium in my blood, the sweet contagion from which I pray never to recover. When I think of you, thought becomes a quaking thing and falls apart in an excess of longing. All of my nerves lean toward you as sunflowers lean toward the sun--helpless, fevered and longing for your light even if it destroys them. I have even dreamt of you with so much violence of desire that my bones almost buzzed with it. I woke myself gasping as if my body had confused your absence with drowning. I am still gasping, my skin still remembers where you have never been--but in my head, you have traced my body a thousand times with fire. 

I confess without remorse: I am faithful neither to my king nor my God when I think about you. I would degrade the highest altar of God for an hour in your presence, but I would make that desecration the holiest rite by which I ever set my eyes on the world. In the silent tribunal of my heart, I am the defendant and the judge, the saint and the heretic, the law and the intoxicating crime against it. 

Were you before me now—clad in the plight of your moon-bright hair, clothed in the sanctity of your beauty and draped in the gravity of your stillness—I would lay down every vow I ever swore: the king's pledge, the priest's decree, the lover's dalliance. I would kneel—not out of humility, but out of reverence too grand to allow my stillness to reach the ground. And when I rose, I would cross the last trembling measure between us as if it were the last distance left to my mortal being.

I would take your mouth like a chalice, like those held at a grand feast: with both hands, with unsteady reverence, knowing each sip is both salvation and damnation. I would drink until the wine bled into blood, until the blood bled into fire, until the fire reduced every scripture I've ever held sacred to ash.

When sleep can no longer bend my will to rest, you come to me—not as a woman—but as a vision of an ancient goddess long before the priests dared speak the name. You come shrouded in dusk, with anklets ringing like the bells of a hidden shrine. The hem of your robe carries the sea's salt, and your eyes are the threshold to the oracle's womb—where no disruptive soul has stepped. Your movement is not an action, but a procession. The earth that crumbles under you changes its scent for your feet, and the sea bending at your feet bends low for a kiss.

I would accept your mouth as one takes a chalice at a high feast: with both hands, with trembling reverence, and with the knowledge of the duality of salvation and damnation in each drop. I would taste every fathom in every cup, until it is wine and blood, and blood turns to fire, and what I have taken as sacred will be consumed in the fire.

When sleep claims me, you visit me not as the mortal you are, but as the remnant of a goddess lost in the closet of multidimensionality of divine being and reality, whom the guise of a priest may have once feared to name. You come dressed in dusk, anklets soft, jingling like the bells at a hidden shrine. Your skirt is draped in the salt of the tide; your gaze plays at the threshold to the sanctuary in which the oracle breathes, whilst forbidden souls dare not intrude. You do not walk, you are a procession. The earth even changes scents at the oasis of your tread, and the sea, crawling at your calves, bows down low and kisses your feet.

When your hand, light as moon-water, meets my cheek, I am undone. It is not just flesh meeting flesh; it is a holy sacrament. In that instant, I am both the pilgrim and the temple, and the high bells of heaven ring in my veins. Before you kiss me, I am already unmade; after you kiss me, I am no longer myself.

The kiss is not a joining; it is a conflagration. My breath mingles with yours and rises together like twin flames, to a single censer, the heat curling upward toward some paradise that ought to turn its face away, yet looks on helplessly.  My hands are again new to record the scripture of your body: psalms in the pledge of your back, hymns in the recesses of your throat, the most dangerous of mysteries in the quickened spaces where language succumbs.

I would have you not in the daytime comfort of reason, the way modesties cluster like nobility near a throne, but in the deadly candlelight wherein all dominions sleep and only the stars watch over us. I would take you the way the high priest takes the oracle, full of trembling awe, reckless hunger, apocalyptic awareness, that once the curtain is pulled, and afterwards no man can ever fully forget what he has had pulled back in front of him.

Come to me like that—not as a bride to an altar, come to me like a deity who seeks altars. Come to me, not as a beggar for mercy, but as the old thunderstorm that floods every trace of sacredness, carrying lilies and wreckage alike in its wake. Place your hand upon me, and touch me like a relic. I will feel the weight of it like both a coronation and a curse. Let me wear it on me— neither in ink nor in gold, but in the bruise of your worship pressed through my skin and into my marrow where there is no undoing it.

You are not simply a mortal delight; you are the heresy I would carve in the marble columns of the temple. You are the gospel I would share in the whispers of sleeping kings' ears so that their dreams would be spoiled by yearning. You are the holy outrage that I would be more than willing to be torn apart before the crowd for - if I cannot still be with you, allow my bones to ourselves. 

And so I am - yours in the smoke of the thurible, yours in the pour of wine, yours in the oath and trespass, yours in the silence of the breath before the hymn and in the moment after the last bell has rung. 

Yours,

In incense and ashes

In reverence and vandalism,

In every sacred and profane heartbeat

In oath and every trespass