Adoremus In Aeternum

This is a rewrite of a poem I wrote about a year ago.

I did not eat for two weeks 

Following the night I gifted you my knuckle bones. 

You may not know this, but there are no "knuckle" bones. 

Our knuckles are simply the knobby ends of our metacarpals. 

So, I first had to cut into my flesh until I found my finger's prologue

And secondly use a bone saw to detach each of those knobby ends. 

I took all ten knuckles as well as my saved baby teeth

- Saved in an incense box from the last one I lost when I was only a foal

And I used a drill to create holes and wove rough twine through the osseous beads. 

I created a rosary: seven knuckle bones and seven baby teeth on the neck loop

And three of the largest knuckles on the sternum strand. 

Still bloody as they were- you looped them between your phalanges and cradled them as if you were praying

And my heart burst into a bloody pulp, a red wine for your drunken pleasures

- My organ tissue sticky and taught like spider webs in my chest cavity. 

And I could not eat

For the maggots that found their way into my ruined heart

Writhed their way into my stomach, making it wriggle and flutter with every slight movement

- Or shift of your eyes to mine. 

Crazed with emotion, I spent those two weeks on my hands and knees

Letting maggots fill the empty space knuckles once occupied.

Panting with joy- my saliva building the river an infant will one day drown in

Shaping you in my mind, formless but bright, my own Polaris. 

That feeling was all too big- and it built a chapel where I once sat alone on the Lamb Hill. 

It was in that chapel

- My blasphemy became astronomy

And my body: 

The candle that melts at the mercy of the fire that is you.