And all is dark
as sadness sleeps
in the mystery of love.
Some, yearning for mastery
over vainly vaunted chastity
have gored their soul-less breasts
with the claws of each forsaken woman
who weeps in endless bookish nights,
robbed of the fiery scars of love.
Have you not heard that silent song
that springs from such pillowed throats,
a choked and chordless tune
of a self abandoned, cast out and cold?
Voiceless, we of the hooded hearts,
the clitoral sheathed and hidden hearts,
have reached behind the fleshly drapes of life.
Our lethal eyes have struck the world,
this homeless world, with writhing wounds
that free new visions, bleeding for us
from another sun, ringed in majesty but hidden
in its mirrored brightness, a world
of myriad paths that we, with mystics walk.
Dreamers and fools.
Lunatics will share with seers.
We follow stolen maps torn from the tangled hands
of the caged and ring-nosed poet, dragged
beyond endurance and cursed by the whipping tongue
of the men of steel and stone.
Shunned by the self same lovers for whom
these routes are trod, and staggered
by the weight of this wealth
we are steadied by this spendthrift truth;
Not yet for all sleeps sadness
in the mystery of love.
Mike McNamara
Illustration Nick Victor