. (or: the god who called me “sir”) .
He entered like a prophecy mispronounced—
storm-soaked, sky-buttoned,
his coat dragging dusk across the floorboards,
eyes lit like stolen copper.
My drink was a cathedral of neglect—
neat bourbon, no ice,
echoing the taste of promises embalmed in dust.
I drank the same way I pray:
sparingly, and to a god I no longer trust.
He didn’t sit; he disrupted.
Barstools shifted like tectonics,
shadows coiled around his boots,
and the jukebox skipped a beat to watch him move.
“You look like someone who’s been patient too long,”
he said, voice lacquered in soft thunder,
vowels curling like smoke from a burnt vow.
I gave him my laugh—
a cracked heirloom I no longer polish.
He wore it like cologne
and leaned in as if to inhale the ruin.
His hands were myths retold badly—
trembling between gentleness and guillotine.
He touched the rim of my glass
like it was my mouth,
and drank it wrong—
reckless, like he’d never been told no
and didn’t believe in scarcity.
The night flexed around us.
My watch stopped ticking.
Time, the faithful beast I’d trained
to lie at my feet,
lifted its head and whimpered.
Part I of Chronogamy introduces the mythic lovers—an older man caught in the gravity of time, and a younger force of disruption dressed in charm and danger. The meeting is quiet but seismic: a study in tension, recognition, and the invisible transfer of power that begins the moment desire is named.
This opening movement establishes the tone of myth as noir, where gods wear leather and wounds speak in metaphor. The poem explores the moment just before surrender—the seductive chaos of meeting someone who doesn't just challenge your structure, but studies it.
Here, Saturn first sees Jupiter—not as a rival, but as possibility. And that, as the speaker begins to sense, is always where undoing begins.
The Chronogamy Collection:
https://hellopoetry.com/collection/136301/chronogamy/