The Unfinished Prayer

Your mouth speaks of gardens I have never seen,

of violets crushed beneath a carriage wheel,

of absinthe poured at dusk, its emerald vein

winding through crystal like a lover's lie.

I watched you once, arranging funeral wreaths

with such precision that the dead grew jealous.

Your movements were as if conducting silence,

orchestrating decline with a delicate ritual.

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What is beauty but corruption slowed to grace?

What is desire but hunger dressed in a robe,

parading through the streets at midnight

where gaslights cough their yellow benedictions

and every doorway holds a small damnation?

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You told me once that Paris waited for no one,

that creeks bear their secrets

down to distant rivers, indifferent and cold.

I believed you then. I believe you still,

though belief itself has grown suspicious, frayed

like a velvet curtain eaten through by moths.

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Your laughter is a rosary of glass beads

dropped on marble. Each note shatters, singing.

I collect the shards. I press them to my lips.

I swallow down the bitterness of broken vows.

We are, all of us, pilgrims to our ruin,

genuflecting at altars made of fire,

kissing relics that have long since vanished.

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You taught me this. You, with your lacing,

your exquisite indifference to my wounds

you are the sacrament I cannot swallow,

the prayer I cannot bring myself to finish.

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Still, I return. Night after night, I return

to your bedroom draped in scarlet silk,

to your bed where pleasure and despair

meet like old friends over cards and whisky.

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Tomorrow I will wake in some strange room

and not remember how I came to rest there.

Tomorrow you will be someone else's ruin.

But tonight, tonight you are my dark cathedral,

and I, your penitent, kneel before the altar

of your terrible, your perfect, your unforgiving grace.