Why I have, regrettably, placed duct tape over your mouth.

(please note the challenge; trigger warnings)

Crude, cheap thing

you said:

“serial killer.”

That’s the culture

talking through

your pleasing lips.

Media, media, media,

reducing, compacting,

twisting into tweets

and bad TV

for the limited conception

of the great unwashed,

who dismiss

Vivaldi and Schoenberg alike

as “classical music.”

Cliché kills essence;

generality obscures beauty;

and most gravely,

grouping precludes

intimacy.

A moment of beauty,

an act of perfection,

is itself. Only.

It’s “serial” offends me,

you understand.

As though fourteen

brushes with divinity

could be plotted

on an X and Y axis,

bodies over time.

Your body is not datum.

Your body is holy,

and will bless me in ways

and positions

you cannot comprehend.

I am not a headline.

Who I am

is rendered perhaps

most suitably in the French:

Casanova des blessures qui coule.

Casanova of the Flowing Wounds.