I kneel, keel, keen at an empty rock shrine

Worshipper to my sinfulness:

When you were still mine

I warded off witches 

By picking your tree

These arbours, your ardour

sowing seeds of unease.

You peeled away my bark

Yet I gorged it down whole

Etched into our roots

Mocking fateful footfall.

My moss on the pillar

To cushion my pain,

But roughness and toughness

Sprouted worms in my brain.

No buck, just rut

Not wed stones 

But headstones: violent gemstones uncut.

Target locked but misfired and damn, misjudged!

Cupid’s heart wept so softly and

Only begrudged.

Could these petals supplant? 

Could I have inspired your sap? 

Let my lungs drown in honey and invite the ants?

Oh, but so sweet! So warm, the taste!

Succour to a sucker: palms pressed to the wastes.

We’d be a sylvan family: Belvedere, 

Prick your ears up and hear those bells, my dear

Taming Medusa, your roaring great lion,

My chiselled Greek seraph atop Mount Zion.

Deity, I cradle, offer kindle up

Lay my flower to a bower once heady with lust

Now, god ghosted

I know how it felt. To have pined,

to have knelt

At my empty rock shrine.

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This poem was written to mourn a failed and lost love. I catch myself still worshipping them and what was, what could have been, now stuck in the same place they once were. This poem serves to reflect this purgatorial state, spanning personal traumas that kept us apart (religion most prominently) – bookended by the harsh realities of the affair, see-sawing between a hellish reality and fantastical heaven.

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