My Soul Has Been Circumcised

I have been here sitting still in my church for three hours and can hear the crickets giving a pulse to the night. A moth beats itself,  to what almost sounds like death, inside of my beside lamp shade.  My breast on fire and blouse on the floor and  I still see that there's snow in his eye and his eye and his eye and also in his. I have seen how the great root of night has grown into their souls so I don't mind much that I have rendered a few hearts along the way as it all felt natural to me; I have the heart of a translator. A translator who has tried to render into common usage the high commands of pure energy, free energy.

I cannot help this and I cannot help them. The lost ones. I cannot help that. I cannot help it and  I blame it on the alter as it seduced me to become its magnificent slave. It says here's my stop. Right here and you know what to do, it's been given to you. It was a gift from the living. Here's my stop and my back grows full of flowers just as they grow silent in your tomb. And my body isn't covered in shame. And several days later I had four stanzas of eight lines each for the four hearts, which certified to me that I had received the Holy fucking Spirit. No thank you...yes, my soul had been circumcised with the wine of love. I, unable to weep, stretched my arms wide knowing that I no longer needed Roman nails to go into his open palms or mine in order to stay alive.  I and we no longer needed that. So this is for the ones that are dead to the longing, dead with hope, dead with the spring. You keep writing carefully sentence after sentence to make your meaning clear because I won't. My dress still has a thousand eyes painted on it like Indra but the art of my longings are over and they are never coming back.

Lay an aural of bouquets, an aural of  gardenia and thistle on that alter as it was the alter after all that seduced me into being a butcher of words, the butcher of hearts that the black ribbon of love has fastened around my neck and to this day I sit still in my church, this church that yes, I can still call mine and, yes...with all of this and all of that I can still love you.

Words & Photo © Wendy Rose Watson