There are secrets, sweet and terrible, that I will tell you. Everything is fleeting. Everything is fluttering. Even the tiny wings of mayflies on the manor walls I now see with the clarity of a scientist and a genie. Their worlds are as inane and fragile as mine, though our industries are different. 

So I don’t have the luxury of withholding from you, or of inching the perimeter, hoping to find a slot through which to slip my confessions. My heart is dripping off of me either way. It spills out and onto the lawn. I ask for a roof and am given a wild garden with four scarlet marigolds. One for each polecat I have loved. 

In the evening I write the hymnal of worship to my gloom, and in the morning stretch my kingly head out of the window and let the sun beam its warmth on my cheeks. Then I press them against your lovely hands, and that warms me too. This is my gloom, my sun. These are my lover’s decadent fingers.

Death, with its best bundle of poppies, comes too soon to steal all I have claimed. My perfumes, my glass bottles of tears and moon blood. The soaked honey wand and all the ink in the inkwell. Even you. So I’m not sorry—I have to eat you with my toast this morning. I have to sing into your mouth.