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.