the priesthood of passion

I don't know what alchemy of blood and sweat he drank that awoke him last night to write this in one of his mystical trance dances, but I want a liter of it. There are gods walking in this world, again. Damn. He won't even tell me who the muse is, he is behind the veil, in the temple of his own religion, inventing and investing his own sacraments. And she is his goddess, even at a distance.

the priesthood of passion

touching in ways I cannot comprehend my friend
let there never be an end, just an intensification.
a sensitization. a visitation to the presentation
of a sensation that blooms from the heart
to part parts of lovers now discovered
uncovered, merging urges purged in haste
when the taste of false gods called the odds
in empirical oracles of ordination of the ordinary.

this is a priesthood of the passions that fashion
themselves in honeysuckle and a flower I'd never known
except in dreams where you came to me, bare and brave
in flesh and fresh hopes and heavens I'd not visited
except in midnight memories of things that never were
but cure the stirring stab of loneliness unlike
licked and sticked unpicked petals that fell, wasted,
as we did, on battlefields of past pretense'd defenses.


William F. DeVault. all rights reserved.