What is desire but to consume?
The holiest form of destruction,
Stirring an exquisite ache no prayer can thin.
It is a beauty so cruel it leaves the saints disgraced.
It breathes through the marrow, the mouth, the wound,
Splitting the spine from the soul with a presence stitched in shadow and silk
She arrived not as a woman,
But as a reckoning-
A cathedral of flesh made from midnight and bone,
Created before the world ever learned how to spell mercy.
He watched her at first from the safe distance of sanity,
Ignoring as God whispered to him to run.
At first, he classified it as fascination.
Then fascination bloomed into obsession the same way rot blooms beneath skin-
Silent, swelling, inevitable.
When he touched her for the first time…
It was the undoing of the commandments-
The rewriting of scripture in the language of skin.
Her taste- a sweet apostle of destruction
Carving prayer into his throat.
He had experienced her power and he now begs God to create another sin.
But there was no turning back.
His mouth learned the litany of her name
And her gaze was an abyss that whispered to him to jump.
Anointed with nails dragged down a spine
He, the disciple-
She, the altar.
Both overflowing with want,
With starvation.
When the angels wept, god finally picked up his pen
However, instead of carving into stone
He carved into trembling flesh:
“Let them be devoured.”
With this, God gifted her with the grace to tear him down to the marrow,
And he was grateful to experience each and every fracture.
Even with this, one cannot end in evil.
Not when love wears the face of ruin-
Not when surrender feels like salvation.
For how can one turn away from something so sinister when it wears the velvet guise of desire, whispering like a lover in the dark?
He laughed then. Loud- wild, cracked open.
Because madness replicated the flavor of her mouth-
Copper and honey, salt and blood.
There is no difference now between suffering and worship,
Agony and ecstasy.
And it is here he understood that love is to be consumed
To beg for the fire to burn cleaner.
Hotter.
Longer.
To become ash in her mouth,
And thank her for it.
He has forgotten his name and replaced it with hers,
Forgotten his face and replaced it with an outline of her hands
He has become broken by devotion and remade in her image.
For what is desire but to consume?
To melt the border between pain and prayer,
To be broken open,
To drown laughing in her shadow
And call it love.
