{writing in form long-hand because someone left the power cord for your computer in South Carolina is hard!}

but here we are -- and kind of nifty to have all the drafts written out on paper. quaint, even. and it's not a pantoum!

heretical sestina for D.
{with lines/phrases from “Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art” by Julia Kristeva, Columbia University Press, 1941.}

impetus of the waiting body, inducement to touch
the intersection of subject and history –
do you like to be held down? known flesh
under gauze, writhing with the wax, affirm
this subversion of the cold universe; your tongue,
saturated with the old discourse, refuses to be held.

do you know where your boundaries are? held,
permeable, opening at unsainted touch
in every sense of the word, this resurrected tongue
a dignified but amorphous domain, history
of turning your head as a model might, or a child, to affirm
away but not breaking, to memorize the safe word: flesh

has reached its apex in the Christian-capitalist era, the flesh
wins, to the point of being its secret motor, some withheld
heretofore undiscovered uses for metal and silk, affirm
the patience of leather, transcendence of contradictory touch,
your back an antilanguage, marble palmed smooth, may history
marionette my bones as you do, into wings, span of tongue

when indulgence refuses to cool but lifts the tongue
like luggage, that gift, discharged energy, quantitative flesh
cathexes, a thumb’s vibrato in unreluctant places, history
invents myth as a kind of speech in which we are held,
sweet compendium of irreconcilable limits and touch,
each gathering areola its own day – affirm –

each arching hip a new instrument – affirm –
you haven’t the boy in you to kill me but this tongue
better than death, equaled only by touch,
call it transformative or even mortal, this flesh
tent where fist is kiss and we are praxis, syllables held,
sound endowed with biography, body, and history,

given tenor and tremble, the substance of history
mentioned but in passing though the floor dips to affirm
each kiss, though the ceiling splits to show we are un-held
by promise or men’s logic or anything but tongue
which is more than enough to sanctify this joined flesh
(isn’t transubstantiation in reverse reason enough to touch?)

bend your touch into an ecstatic history
where the grace of flesh is the only way to affirm
one true god, your tongue, right there, held.

*