Confession of a Heretic

The Liturgy of the Open Vein

I do not know where your body ends and the evening begins.

You are a territory of heavy magnets and sudden bells,

a wicked ruin where the light goes to practice its dying.

I want to taste the fresh rotten wound of your presence,

not as a hunter, but as one who kneels before a broken fruit,

finding the wine that the winter could not freeze.

There is a blood rainbow rising from the damp grass of your chest.

Is it a bridge? Or is it the signature of a God who only speaks in color?

You dance, and the air around you becomes a thick, intoxicated cathedral,

humming with the sin of simply being alive, simply being meat and spirit,

a saint whose halo is made of the very dust he kicks toward the stars.

Do not be afraid of the decay. The rose is only a rumor

until the soil claims its debt. To rot is to arrive.

To bleed is to become a map of every thirsty thing.

We are the guests of our own disappearance, dancing in the ruins of the light

In the bayou's breath, where the live oaks lean

Like sinners eavesdropping on a fading queen,

The saint sprawls in his splintered bed of clay,

His marble gaze dissolving into gray.

"If the saint doesn't rot," the river murmurs low,

Its current thick with secrets it won't show,

"How will the flowers know where to find the light?"

They cluster close, drawn to the coming night.

Thunder rolls in the roots' dark grip,

Of flesh betrayed by time's unyielding whip—

The holy frame crumbles, a king's crown cracked,

Turning to loam what sanctity once packed.

Fever dreams in the moss-draped heat,

Where passion's pulse and piety meet defeat;

That saint, once sermon-sharp and sternly posed,

Now feeds the camellias with his rotted loads.

For in this gothic garden of the South's wild heart,

Decay's the door where grace and rot depart—

No bloom without the body's base retreat,

The light they chase born from his bone-deep heat.