I wore a slip of lace over my body like depravity to our bed post
I thought it might be easier to see through
I wore it underneath my hello kitty blanket while Cerberus guarded my slumber
because I still believed God would sanction sin’s ascendance through my window in
some cruel seasonal resurrection
and I would be blessed
in bites and slurry plump bruises and depraved drunk voicemail messages stamped down my spine like one repentant canto after another.
I wore it in your shower beneath 4am’s heat lightning tantrums
I bare no rain but all of her divinity and it was already saturated in sinister’s vice
when the cues scripted by our sane City of Woes were already read,
I thought she still might notice Carnificina born in black
because there is a creator of Perfect Justice after all,
This I know,
so when I read “ABANDON ALL HOPE”
in the searing hot sand between our toes under my nightmare entombment,
I ran myself free from this skin of avarice and pulled over me the only salvation granted at the gates of Today and Tomorrow.
In the three full eternities of dreams I was being circled and as I was told
it was because we cannot unravel scarry night,
marked like a chronological trail of contrapasso,
without his Gothic shadows whispering in a low over the frayed bursts
they once were a rib cage,
a pretty little fingernail,
a delicate hipbone…
I wore the lace and black and blood because I hoped that we would wake
when these war fronts were illuminated by moonlight and the puddling rust would dry into
red, thorn-less roses.
and you would harvest,
kiss, and worship out all malignancy
but now I know I will wear it like a flaming red “A” to the safe sanction of a childhood comforter because,
in hell I was taught to be
a lovely piety,
held firmly by the crown of my soft small head underneath bubbling red riptides
my screams as thin as a spring wind escaping through the fiery chasm dug in my stomach-
even when my child’s bedtime sleep
takes me to the fifth circle of dreams.