One.
Your tongue is a whale,
swallowing sinners,
beached and bloated, useless
and sharply piercing festive
drunkards and judgmental ministers.
We fled from You into the trees
Would you deny the emptiness?
Claiming a metaphor and what youthinki
                                                             desperately wish were true,
would you clasp my hand with yours,
blood-soaked, yourself pregnant with doubt?

it is in you, a tumor
swollen with snake eggs and spider webs.
"Out, damn spot!"
Even surgeons couldn't purge the dirt:
blood for blood, cleansed by death.

Oedipus, clawing eyes out in horror,
now clawing along walls to find the way;
the blind man, lost, paralyzed in darkness.
Oedipus, longing for light again, wipes
eyes and does not see the red-stained fingers,
causing even doves to moan.

Two.

In a song, yesterday, we could live on the sun,
burning so bright we could not set foot
on that pallid moon I once promised you for a home,
a cracked bit of stone full of sparkles and life.

The annointing was fiction!
Between us, so real I had no need for an [other]
yet our eyes, polished with holy tears,
sufferwanderlust.  

What we once had is now broken;
what we once were is now perverse;
what we once loved is now abused.

You have taken your lantern to
a place with no sunsets: watch
the world unwind, spiraling like
paper streamers into the flame;
I long for the days we used to weep together.

Three.
I would follow You to death,
the water refusing to dam behind me,
pouring pardon, pardon.

when i married i stopped writing
because i no longer felt inspired to
tell him what it was like to fall in love with him
i was in love stop scratch
clichés onto parchment turning over a new page
in our history book, books burning at the end
of this age.

At the mere mention of Your name
I feel wells rising up, blurring the lines
between falling in love and being in love;
is this what I have been missing for
two thousand
nine hundred and twenty
days?

It is like eating pineapple in Hawaii for the first time.
Oh, my Lord.