His embrace may be construed as an act,
his handshake a shill, his smile on the edge
of aggression: a wolf marking his path

will flash his teeth and pat men on the back
to sniff the vapors of his rival’s breath.
His embrace may be construed as an act

of kindness to the novice eye, his tact
a slight of hand to mask the silhouette
of aggression. A wolf marking his path

will scan the party’s aftermath,
the room refracted in his green coupette.
His embrace may be construed as an act

of ownership, circumscribed by a trap
for a passing skirt, which is the secret
of aggression: a wolf marking his path

will circle every option (then fall back
to catalogue the pearls around a neck).
His embrace may be construed as an act
of aggression, a wolf marking his path.

I. L’Approche

This bed resents a vacancy; it prefers
the hint of traffic, rumor in the frame.
I watched your patience test what it confers
when hesitation hardens into aim.
Don’t call it thought; thought files its notes away.
This is the body angled toward a cue,
weighing which remark must be delayed,
which silence makes the wider avenue.
Something always yields. We smile and place the bet.
I’ve seen the evening turn on lesser things—
a glance misread, a practiced half-regret,
a laugh that opens more than it can claim.
Lie still. Anticipation does the rest.
We’ve learned how interest rises in a guest.

II. L’Art de Différer

You grip the post the way one grips a line—
to steady it, to see how far it bends.
Like Catherine, who knew the grand design
was letting appetite instruct her friends,
you learn how power sharpens when it waits,
how favor ripens better when deferred.
She governed bodies as she governed states:
by use, exchange—by never saying “third.”
No sentiment, no vacancy, no pause
that couldn’t be revised or filled at need.
You’ve studied this: how hunger without laws
behaves impeccably when left to lead.
Outside, the drums remember older crimes.
Inside the room, the bedpost knocks in time.

III. La Coupure

They enter when the room has lost its edge
and cleverness begins to pass for need.
The wine remembers every careful pledge,
which throats to cut with courtesy.
Desire is labor, unrehearsed as play.
The skill is knowing when to bare the blade,
to let a sentence nick the tender way
and call the blood a compliment well-made.
The prophet fails who thinks this ends in light.
The source was never neutral, never fair.
What came before us presses into night—
We drink. The sentence holds; the bedsheets turn
as melted candles gutter, flare, and burn.

I. Appearances

The ballroom tilts. The mirrors double-count
our bodies, stitching fur to borrowed skin.
The wolf perfects his charm; the witch, affront.
The trickster learns which grin is discipline.
We waltz in borrowed masks, our faces lent
to appetite and rumor, slick with gin.
Each step repeats the oath we never meant,
each turn rehearses how the trap begins.
The mirrors swear there’s only what we see.
The maze insists the fault is in the eyes.
I follow, thinking freedom means to be
unfixed—unowned—until the music lies.
The wolf leads gently. That is how it starts.
The hand is light. The teeth are at the heart.

II. Arguments

The fur comes loose. It always does at last.
The witch stands bare, her spell a cracked device.
The trickster laughs too late—he’s overpast
the moment when the joke might still suffice.
The mirrors hold. They will not be outpaced.
They name what danced as fraud, what paid as price.
There was no center—only being chased:
The maze contracts, its logic undisguised.
You called it play. You called it changing roles.
You said the lead was equal, step for step.
But someone bleeds when symmetry dissolves.
The wolf remembers while the others slept.
We are all masks—yes—but some faces bite,
and some are only bitten in the night.

There are no wolves, neither shrewd nor recondite,
who would venture to touch her willfully
in the places she left exposed to the light.
It wasn’t a sin, there were no wages— she
hid the wounds beneath her skin, a pale hue
that appeared as dappled sunlight on her face.
Bitter men visit to remember their youth,
in this bed where her body never ages,
preserved in the mirror on the vanity.
The only indiscretion is the silence
in the room, the sheets now gathered at her feet.
You see, she wants to speak. Speak then,
we’re listening, intently as gentlemen
and devils may, all horns and motivation.

My love, it is a skein, a sheet drawn taught
from my elbows to my feet. We pretend
we are resilient until we are caught,
then uncover the cheeky truth: women
want and want. There’s a voice that hammers through,
an incessant beating upon the door,
that dire need for You. I tremble, I do.
Yet I would rather defer to a whore
who leaves her intentions on the divan,
who prefers to romp with the Casual Wit
than to chat with a Pious Bore in vain.
I want, too, or shall I deign to submit
I wantonly need. The rules of the game
are set, and there’s nothing more to explain.

I finally see that whether my actions
are noble or immoral, the end result
is my spiritual death. I am far too prudent
and shrewd to allow myself to be hopeful.
This is a strange and terrifying proof:
to love you is to hate myself. A judgment
written in the margins will not change this truth,
it is a tautological sentiment,
a garden variety uroborous
hidden in an a priori argument:
in choosing you, I have given up my choice.
There’s nothing left for me to do, other than
to stop analyzing what I already
know to be true, or simply to stop breathing.

I. L’Interprète

Provocateurs line the street and chant my name
like psalms that bruise the mouth that has to sing.
I smell dark rooms in Drury Lane—
warm rot where bodies kneel to anything.
I’d tell more secrets than I ever dared,
but secrecy attends me like a vow;
I sing to myself, stripped of pretense, half-prepared,
my vigilance the god I serve somehow.
Even these words want skin, want consequence.
I sent an offering—desire made clean—
it came back wearing Penelope’s face,
refusal lit like mercy in between.
I call this faith. I call it sacrifice.
It sounds like love. It will not save my life.

II. Le Faiseur de mythes — révisé

She never knew my people, how we strayed
through desert years to stitch a god from bone.
My brother found the heart; mother laid
her mouth on language; father named the throne.
I found the rest—the sex that would not pray,
the part they wrapped and buried in the sand—
and carried it as altar, debt, and name,
a wound I learned to bless, then understand.
You promised me that song would make me whole.
I married wrong and called that flesh made law.
I named my hunger marriage, named the role
obedience, and crowned the taking raw.
I am a man, I claim, because I choose.
I choose the vow. I break it. That’s the ruse.

III. Pénélope au métier

Your songs of dismemberment fall like leaves
the wind rehearses nightly in my sleep.
You made your mind a forum—what it sees
is what the loudest voices keep.
There is a road that leads back into time
where Anti-Osiris guards your broken whole,
where Blake’s priests chant their crooked rhyme
and call their hunger unity of soul.
You want one skin, one god, one welded truth.
Love grows by splitting—this you cannot bear.
What you would cut away to prove your youth
is what refuses altar, knife, or prayer.
You call it loss. I call it what remains.
God is not One when One requires pain.

never sleeps, even when the body sleeps,
it angles over images and purrs,
incurious to deeper scrutiny,
whether vacant or in bloom—it demurs,
licking at your face at noon, as welcome
as a shriek that deadens in the middle
of a crowded room, or a suspicion
you shove to the back where pithy women
congregate to drink—they ogle you,
they know their lonely hearts on the wall
are somehow your fault (though you are obtuse,
basking like a cat on the window sill—
inert, an overheated ingénue,
still able to fool a critic or two).

at some fish-and-goose soirée) “…but I bet
your alabaster skin could sway a priest
into bed—though it breaks down, all of it,
eventually: this punch, this pickled beef,
that loud mongrel on the rug by the door
ripping the tassels with his teeth.” She winced
then turned to retrieve her hat from the floor—
and as she ascended the steps, I glimpsed
beneath her twirling dress a galaxy
spiraling about a white core. My heart
kept time with the thumping on the ceiling
after that—some drunk promoting his art
by fucking blindly in the dark, without
any Elizabethan caveats.