Once, as part of a drunken party game
to name the strangest, most inexplicable place
where we had ever disrobed, I said
a cathedral somewhere in southern France,
with the light from the stained glass
shining down onto my ribcage
and playing musical chairs
in the cavities beneath my chest. In truth,
this was a lie, of course, but what I did
in that empty, echoing antechamber
was not so much disrobing as feeling
transparent, with only my opaque fingertips
left behind to trace figure eights
in the dust on the floor beams. This was probably
some time just after I turned fifteen,
and I knew nothing about love,
but I liked to think of it
as a little man in the back of the chapel,
rubbing himself down with palm oil
and confessing his inability
to stop touching himself. I didn't think
that love was an altar in the back
of an empty room, a mountain raised
like a knife over my head, an answer
to a question that no one ever asked.
That night, years later, no one in the room
really wanted to hear about love,
but somewhere, in a jet-black antechamber
in the back of my tangled hippocampus,
I kept an old weathered journal
whose pages were worn thin,
leaving only ink stains, rising
like exaltations in the night,
the way a moth flutters
to the nearest porch light, just to know
we can still see straight through it.
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