Not Allegoric
I carry the Book of Lilith wrapped in
the softened leather bindings of my skin,
dorsal and ventricle covers kept tied
by the silken ribbons of discretion
and good manners. Speak of the mindless things,
and I will not remind you that the words
of the oldest code of woman lie carved
to the marrow in my bones. All our bones
hoarding the prime DNA in silence
go about that whorish replication;
you are in syndication now, laying
where you've been left. How passive our language
has become. I've a hard time believing
this is what any god wanted, this sense
of unbeing, of print runs binding blank
pages within the stamped clay features of
our unspeaking faces. It must be so
unspeakable. This tale told in furtive
coupling of hand to flesh we transmit by
the charming and heretical ink of
Darwinian fucking. Not so unfilled,
so virginal then, these white pages. Read
by the hands of men, the topography
of cheek and breast, belly and hip rising
and falling in a braille whose tongue feels close
to one known. But is not. A vast land filled
with untold stories lost to men's souls and
guarded by women's promises moves like
honey - warm, safe, cocooned in the spheres of
those things of which we do not speak. Content
they fashion themselves again and again
as muscle and tendon, lung and bellow.
We wipe with damp cloth dust of ages past
from the chalice of life; there are reasons
men design their vessels for drink with such
grace and beauty, while leaving other works
utilitarian and unadorned.
I find this tautology oblique and
amusing, less so the ineffable
haunting of worship at expunged altars,
hushed doctrine carbon scribed between the sheets,
plagiarized by the bastardization
of our very existence. We endure
an endurance clamoring of secrets
and get on with the work of getting on:
an ancient history of genesis.
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