If I
came to you with the proper ceremonies,
bowing down and intoning
the correct words of praise,
lighting candles
and rattling my beads,
and if I

caressed your marble feet that peek
from underneath these unyeilding robes,
and kissed them,
and promised impossibilities,
and if I

gave to you the tears of decades,
fermented long within me
and only now seeing daylight,
and if I

screamed what was hidden,
offered up the substance of my veins
and my firstborn
and sacrificed all I love,
then would you

take me up in your virgin arms and
touch your cool virgin lips to mine
and would you

drink my tears like summer wine,
your desert-traveling thirst
draining me to the bone,
and would you

spread wide your clashing wings and
shatter me into bits of sky and
make me tenderly anew,
breath of your breast,
flesh of your
immaculate marble womb?