Angels do not die at the point of a knife, but
does not love erase as sure as death?
The finality of consumption, satiation,
planets swallowed by their stars,
skin melting like flung candle wax into shapeless pools.
They both are our nature and our escape from it;
crashing this borrowed body into yours,
we cease to be and are everything,
a shared fate, starvations sympathetic to one another.
The future is but words dripping from your teeth,
turn over, turn around, open up.
The past a trail of goose bumps, skin drying tacky-slick.
The present, hands running up my thighs,
forcing the hair against its natural bent,
again the sympathetic smell and taste and sensation.
A great snake, temptation devouring itself
on a bed with blue sheets.

A hundred holy, holies, for your murmuring lips,
nipping and slippery and salt-stung,
a thousand hosannas for the hands that mark
this skin we wear, you break off,
cry nonsense, alleluias in no language I speak.
Dripping word.
The roots of my tongue and belly aching.

We are made as angels: our erasure
is to yield.