Seduction

Locate the fractal
jagged softness

of your body in mine,

atoms honed to silence

by the blade of my gaze.

Be the same empty sky

I Am, but musky with
your own desire.

We are ripples, fragments of light

frolicking on waters of darkness,
the absence that is always still.

Love has freed us from the truth.
We could be fearless petals
in a hurricane.

We could be dolphins

smiling with inscrutable beatness,
playing in a green sea of lies.

Even the name of God is a lie,

poised in the vast parenthesis

of zero.

Now you are halfway through

this poem,

which is my translation

of ancestral runes

sealed behind a temple door

in the loins of an ancient cedar,

a portal among roots and thorns
that no one opens but a priestess
with the face of a cobra,
black belly of a famished panther,

dragonfly wings veined
with hieroglyphs that tell nothing.

Her eyes are broken vases

spilling opals only seen

in the blinding beam of your shadow.

I lie.

This is a seduction, one thread

in my ode to untruth, a web

of terror and beauty, the lies

that make the world

possible.

Art: Jaguar Legend by Susan Seddon Boulet