Habanero Love: A Poem of Sacred Passion

Celebrating your heart fire

In the spirit of February 14, this selection for you from my book, Habanero Love: A Poem of Sacred Passion.

Usurp my throne.

Send your legions

into my private chambers.

Have them tear up the bedding

and hold me down against the cool,

naked floor.

I will repent,

confess all of my heart’s

truant wanderings.

Replace my candles

with your impossible brilliance.

Light up the dingy corners

of this now shocked room.

Burn away the webs and shadows.

Sweep your brightness over this

stale dusk dimness.

Freshen the weeping

I do as a daily chore.

Bid your archers

release a thousand arrows

over my castle walls.

Eclipse the sun with your assault.

Darken sky. Reap moon’s memory.

Blister my moat with your passion fire.

I abdicate what power I held.

It is yours. Wield it against my remains.

I am a forbidden city. Enter me.

Populate my court with your natural scent.

Don’t wash.

Mark this territory that is my life

with the spices Love’s pestle grinds

inside your tender mortar.

Send those snowy messenger doves aloft

with notes writ in blood and mist.

Send them flocking to the roof of existence.

Let them perch among the angels,

and leave word of this mundane unraveling.

I am no king, and you are no queen.

I am an illiterate scribe babbling

by a secret brook.

You are the language of paradise,

flowing through an unknown cavern.

I look into your spring water

for my articulation.

You are the crystal sayings

that rise like silver effervescence

through the pristine ebb and gurgle,

to pronounce my surrender

in miraculous tongue.

I wade in shallow waters looking

for coins of shells,

to string you a necklace

fit for Divinity.

You are the strong breeze

over the deeper bay,

pinnacling as you reach me,

turning me in your breakers,

smashing me to gypsum grain,

a fine silt of awe so small and particulate,

I fit easily through the fissure

leading inward to your virgin cove.

I repeat a mantra that begins with YOU.

You interrupt gently, and offer an older script that ends with BEGIN.

June’s lost flowers are rediscovered in your eyes of meadow and petals,

blowing their billowing seed

out into galloping gusts of seduction

that drift like wisps of silk in the direction where I have buried solitude.

Nocturnal creatures,

purring and stalking,

curve their fluid forms

around sedentary trees,

ever closer to the structure that houses day,

ever proximal to sunrise’s first notes,

that reading room where Love’s letters

are littered along the windowsill,

and rampant around the floor,

pieces of a vision settled in the

grooves of a hardwood luster,

embedded in comfort pillows

that catch like cashmere your sleepiness,

and draw you down to an after-passion sleep, your skin still wet and cooling.

I wait there in that encampment,

my fingers roughened by pitch

and kindling prior to the fire.

Now you are a sleeping sonnet

woven into my air.

I see your spirit in the space

between the flames,

dancing a fluid grace that charms

my tears again,

sending them over the cusp

of my heart barrel,

seeping through my pores and planks,

perspiring my wood now aged with a timeless soaking in wine of yearning,

grapes of longing, wrath of burning,

insidious creeping of vineyard tendrils through my trellis,

through my latticework,

where once my roots were situated

securely.

You have overturned the landscape, disrupted the soil.

My beginnings are upside down

and staring at a featureless sky,

dazzled by a hypnotizing blue.

I am the redwood laid down, retired, humming as my fiber churns to dust

in the maws of a million mystic termites

made of glass and glory,

sparked from within by a pulse of light divinely sourced and flickering

against life’s eternity.

You are the sacrament on my tongue.

As I close my mouth,

I feel you melt into my baptismal ecstasy.

You disappear into the dream my soul bore eons before notions of romance sprung like roses from the soil of human instinct.

You are the pews, stained wonderfully.

I am the cracks in between,

pining for your attention,

aging with you as you age,

oiling your length and breadth

and depth in the substance of adoration,

I am the creaking that bears all weight placed upon your enduring wood.

I am the draft

through the cracked open window,

and the uprising of colors on light beams through stained glass that portrays your aura, and epic journey.

I walked a dust storm,

hoping at best for a pause in the blindness.

Then came you, and sky opened its clarity,

offered a deep well amidst the nothingness with water so sweet and clean,

I thought it tears of angels.

Then came you,

and the purifying rain announced

with a scent of air so intoxicating,

and the first stalks of green

with buds of promise,

and sound of water falling,

and stone music at the bottom

of a clear lagoon.

And then came you,

oasis filled with fruit and shade,

and ribbons of poetry splashed

on canvases of leaves,

and silence flowering,

and a wisp of sensuality growing

from a grove of willow song.

I entered Love’s chapel,

and there you were,

minister, congregation,

rafters, reverent air.

I sat at your ivory statue,

witnessed your tears running

toward the floor.

I caught them in my palms and drank,

a potion that carried me

into a further sanctuary,

and there you were,

scripture, floating and diaphanous.

You entered my membrane

and reordered my composition.

What I was,

was no longer what I was.

Once, I was corn stalk

in an abandoned field.

Now I was corn pollen

in a ceremony of dancers and drummers,

and holiness that cannot be pantomimed.

I entered Love’s chapel,

and there you were,

the prayer I had always uttered.

The praise I had deeply offered.

The worship my breath bequeathed.

I entered Love.

You were its chapel.

I entered your chapel.

Love entered me.

I died into a birth

unprecedented and unrecordable.

I became the Ahhh in the breast of men.

I became Amen.

Eternity.


*From my book, Habanero Love: A Poem of Sacred Passion. Available worldwide where books are sold.



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