I.

From quarantined hallways made of mirrors reflecting myself to my
wretched self, ranks of diseased waxworks insulated in fungous layers
of malfunctioning freedom and feeding on the festering luxury of despair,
from stagnant residue of already aged lusts and secret cycles of stalactite-
seeping guilt sorted out as indefinitely postponed prison sentences –
from these, as from the canvas concentration camp of Dorian Gray,
     I turned in desolation and I broke myself on You.

From concubines of sucking screens screeching sacrilege, and the
coffee-stain desiccation of civilization converted to a one night stand,
from the squalid piety of comfortable people, the rage of glutted crowds
and the soul-fat Reaper haunting all the lecherous shopping malls, from
my own lacerated ears sheltering in a rotting cocoon of resentment –
from these, as from the scarlet stench of Josephus’ flesh-charred memoirs,
     I fled in desperation and I came at last to you.

Now is the unthinkable incarnated in my long delayed burnt-self
offering, identification with blood and masticated bread safety-pinned
to a crucifix and implanted in my body by our mutual death, coitus
of the mortal and divine. Reconstruction commences, infusing the depleted
cells of my polio-stricken soul with the DNA of Deep Heaven – this is the
consummation that reinterprets and redeems the original storyline.
     Your yoke is easy and Your burden is light.

Too long have I carried them kicking in the womb of my malcontent mind,
these oxygen-deprived embryos of the unspeakable, infantile illusions of
hope that I only realize are real when you walk me through the surgery
and I afterwards notice, glittering awkwardly at the corners of your smile,
emerging from the remains of your overgrown loneliness and flowering at
our fingertips, new nightlights of a world where even power-lines are lovely.
     Our insurgence is christened by the fusion of our lungs.

II.

We didn’t know when we began what new implosions of naivety awaited as
we spend star-precious hours closing what is left of the gap, which grows
harder to bridge even as it shrinks, until, like the speed of light, you become
unapproachable and a day comes when I toss a spider strand spun from the
raw nucleus of my soul and you let it fall and the bet is lost and my screaming
eyes realize you don’t get it and never will. I am not enough for you, and there is
     no escape from loneliness. The unspeakable remains.

Is this then the initiation? The absence of God and the impossible pursuit
of the infinite, a horizon everywhere equally distant and baffling as Hilbert’s
Hotel? When these blister-bleeding feet have climbed half the reverse escalator
to eternity, I am still nauseated by the scandalous scent of the void and all Your
so-called comings that feel just like the departure of the ghost-gray geese over
the acid-eaten Shenandoah of my emptiness. The more I give the better I grasp
      that the unreachable remains and I am the abandoned.

Maybe there is another way. What if we stop trying to catch the gossamer
butterflies whose wings will only be smeared by our grasping fingers, and
what if we achieve our ineffable union by embracing the overlapping ache of
the gap, taking comfort in our mutual isolation, and what if we renounce
possession, devote our disenchanted selves to fueling the intoxicating circuit
of our insatiable hunger, in restlessness discover understanding-passing peace
     as we cut short our quest to make faith superfluous.

Maybe there is another way. What if You are found in the very darkness I am
choking on and the outdated Carmelite was right when he whispered that all
things worth wanting come by way of the desert? What if You’ve already been
here, dirt-creased palms up in surrender to neutron-caving obscurity as You
hike these selfsame highways towards a God Who turned His back and broke
Your heart, Who never gets sky-lined because He is here in the bat-blind murk
     and if it were not so, You would have told us.