Why I have, regrettably, placed duct tape over your mouth.
(please note the challenge; trigger warnings)
Crude, cheap thing
you said:
“serial killer.”
That’s the culture
talking through
your pleasing lips.
Media, media, media,
reducing, compacting,
twisting into tweets
and bad TV
for the limited conception
of the great unwashed,
who dismiss
Vivaldi and Schoenberg alike
as “classical music.”
Cliché kills essence;
generality obscures beauty;
and most gravely,
grouping precludes
intimacy.
A moment of beauty,
an act of perfection,
is itself. Only.
It’s “serial” offends me,
you understand.
As though fourteen
brushes with divinity
could be plotted
on an X and Y axis,
bodies over time.
Your body is not datum.
Your body is holy,
and will bless me in ways
and positions
you cannot comprehend.
I am not a headline.
Who I am
is rendered perhaps
most suitably in the French:
Casanova des blessures qui coule.
Casanova of the Flowing Wounds.