You smell like pure warmth, sweet and heady, like a muggy summer night just after a heavy rainfall; earthy. A wet cedar, woody scent with an undertone of citrus. You smell of home, a sheltered blanket of safety.

I study and read about it
Sing songs in the glory of it
Carve it on your tongue
and lips
Tattoo, etch and kiss it
on my hips

Interpreter of dreams,
you see the future
once a cynic but it seems
with you I am sure.
So I kneel and crawl
slowly towards your temple,
I am a broken statue
that only you could reassamble.

I pray, please do not humble
yourself before any god,
for you know your words
are worth more than gold.
I praise and worship you
as my one and only king,
even your sins are the
absolute truth I'm praying.

For you I would blindlessly
find a new Babylon,
for in your holy name
I saw eternal salvation.
Darling, there is no more
unbearable exile
than being far away
from you in miles.

Still I exalt you and in you
I put all my faith,
for you are the beast
my demons see as bait.
Yet you call on me
like an angel from your dream,
my songs are whisper,
while my poems are screams.

I found you one fateful,
raging night in the lion's den
we ran away with the wolves,
never returned again.
My religion is loving you
and blessing your name.
One touch and forgetting you
is a losing game.

In your quiet I found my
passing repentance,
yet our love is a loud,
deafening covenant.
On my knees,
I cast away your burdens,
in your name
I can move mountains.

how the honey drips down your fingers like it longs for your wrists.

i dont even like honey, but god help me, i love it.

i dream of how it glistens, glitters, gleams.

my body is a temple, almost rubble. everytime you breathe, and give me more, its like an earthquake strikes and i fall to the ground more, one day ill just break.

in a good way.

i want to be drenched it in.

glorious golden hue, sparkling on my tongue.

taking the gift, looking you in the eye as my eyelashes flutter. do you enjoy this? giving all of it to me?

your honey is so precious.

youre so ******* precious. do you think i only want you for honey?
i could do without it just fine, but oh god, not you.

but please dont stop giving me honey, i hate it so much.

GULA

Castor and Pollux
joined forever at the hip.
I could split myself
into two halves just
so they could each get a taste.
I will etch into
both their ribs and lungs
so when they exhale, it’s my
name that warms their breath.

ACEDIA

I have done nothing
but consult oracles to
find a solution
and like Oedipus
I will sit here on my throne
to repeat fathers'
sins. Dear God, am I
the miasma that reeks here?
Would I change, if so?

LUXURIA

Eros and Psyche
have yet to match us, dear boys.
In confessional,
I speak of the flesh-
bruised like rotting fruit, marks
of desperate youth.
Heads bowed in prayer,
this is Dionysiac
ritual madness.


AVARITIA

Will Hades greet me?
If I spit coins from my mouth,
will the ferryman
take pity on me?
He must know my odyssey.
This is déjà vu,
a fable passed down
by generations. A hymn,
Homeric and worn.

IRA

Adonis river
runs red like veins filled with blood.
The anemones
for my two brothers,
a crown for each of them to  
decorate their heads
before guts are spilled.
I know this will end in war,
no glory for me.

INVIDIA

Heroes never die,
they say. So was Heracles
jealous of Linus?
To know forever,
to escape the throes of death
sounds like Hell to me.
What lives on except
curses and their tragedy?
I am no hero.


SUPERBIA

I will take my fire,
let it blaze until I die.
Prometheus would
have been proud of me.
Maybe from this, I will kindle
something from the heat:
Write poems in ash,
for the ones I have scalded,
or the ones I love.

(Maybe those two things
are not unlike after all.
Maybe so, maybe not.)

This beach house is blue
Yet it feels gray.
A sign on the wall points to the ocean
But actually it's pointing to the bay.

The walkway is lined with seashells
That are broken, jagged, and painful.
The front door doesn't even open
The force needed is almost shameful.

The feeling inside the rooms upstairs
Relates to its dark and boxed-in design
The oppressive weight of dead eyes
Watching for one step out of line.

Its uncomfortable and terrifying
Hardly a place for relaxation.
But each gray year we come here
To get more depressed on vacation.

So today you started with the why's, making excuses and reasons as you have every season since I looked at you, but now I see you and you think you can use the glint from that shiny silver tongue to blind me so you can bind me in your arms until I can't breath. And while you seem pretty qualified at splitting hairs and splitting sheets that doesn't mean you'll be splitting legs, not unless you get down on your knees and join this Sunday service, my body is a temple and you will worship it.
     It is not a crime scene to be inspected, not a base to be infiltrated and not fire to be quenched. The masses have called out "Sister art thou there?" and I have replied rising from what remains of my childlike mind saying,"Yey, I am the mosque, come to me and fill me with your joy and celebrations, but only the worthy shall enter my sacred halls and learn my holy obsessions." So don't think you can break me in because I am not something to be broken, not something to be dominated or overtaken in one moment of reckless inspiration.
     I see you shaking. Whether it's in fear or lust or just from the itch of dust forming on your skin from sitting patiently and waiting for the day when I give in, but just like you, it won't come. So whether you are wide eyed or tired eyed you will behold the glory that is within me, the strength that defines me and realize that I am baptized in the dawn of a new day. And you should know that I will not be coerced and as far as I'm concerned if you haven't learned by now that I am not your outlet, not just something to help you come around when your feeling down, your living puppet, then you never will. So you will never fill the gap between my thighs with your lies and turn around and call it love.
     Preach all you want but this choir isn't listening, it will sing to drown out the deafening sound of your screeching, so after hours when my church is closed and your feeling empty and alone just remember that next communion I'll be waiting for your confessions, and then maybe you'll receive my blessings. But before then my doors are closed until you know the difference between impulse and infatuation.
     So until the day when you figure out what you need to do and say, focus on your words, and not the way my bees talk to your birds.