Personal (Litanies of Balneum-Marie)

First, you will be strangled with unstomachable satire. Then, hung with the noose of hyperbole. You will try to reason with how much I love things, and with how much affection I give. I drink fully from the glass. You should, too.

You will grow irritated with my insistence on a deeper meaning in all inexplicable things, for you are an atheist. Our lips are touching; that is all that should matter.

You will fail to understand how I exist in art, and how it exists in me; how our union is perfect but imperfect, always full of the satisfaction of progress;

I will be a mouthful, a hairful, a handful

I will know our tragic future, but will love you regardless. That will be the worst of all.

I will know dreams you have dreamed forever, and you will hate me for bringing you to comprehension.

You will find my body repulsive, decaying into blackness, corrupting and strangling your pristine male purity.

You will look twice within you, and find you decaying, too;

We will grow red with the passion of hatred for each other;

We will become unable to forgive, more and more so, not less and less so as one would think it to be;

You will say "I am drowned, this has not cooled my senses, I cannot breathe, my emotions do not cease;"

I will shiver while weaving more with my loving hands, extracting the thread;

I will have cracked, drowned and soaked the puzzle pieces of your psyche, floating jigsaw in a world without relent, constant nausea at lack of control;

I cannot be broken because I have no solid volume. Fire sits on watery pyre of the bier, loving hands constructing labyrinthine leads. Hold, hold, Ariadne's thread;

After which you will find yourself at center, at calm, unexpected oneness, no difference at all

You, too, will break and say

"I was cooled;

I was same as woman."

But psyche uncovered, discovered

I will refuse to be eternity.

Your self was to be loved long ago.

Kiss me goodbye.

My cause was to cool. Waters of lessons uninvestigated.

So emerges your rising sun but only

After cooling and

Pinprick fireball stars that

Exquisite Queen of the Night cloaked.

3/8/13