City of Legends

I am not unaware that my latest work, a seven poem cycle using the sacraments of the Catholic Church as metaphors for romantic and even erotic imagery and actions, has created a stir.  I expected it to.

But the truth is, I am an heretic.  Always have been, always will be.  But for clarity, let’s set the record straight about these seven works.

• Nowhere do I use obscene or profane language.
• The romantic and erotic imagery is established as being in the framework of a lifelong, committed and yes, wedded union between two individuals, specifically myself and the Sunday Girl.  It is not a call to excess, adultery or self-flagellation.  Okay, maybe a little self-flagellation.
• It is beautiful, soulful and one of the most proud accomplishments of my life to have penned these.  I include what is almost certainly the only surviving haiku of my career as a writer, a sonnet and a return to my own triskadekian canto form. 

The seven poems are:

• Baptism:  The cleansing and public conversion rite, making the transition, marking the preparation to receive the spirit.
• Confession:  Admitting past mistakes and errors in judgment, making clean and clear the way.
• Communion and Absolution:  The taking of the flesh and the blood into you.  In this case I literally used this (and some Catholic friends are NOT happy with me right now) as an allegory for oral sex, where flesh and body fluids are exchanged and taken into one another to blur the barriers between one body and the other.
• Confirmation:  Affirm what was said in the throes of passion, the morning after.
• Matrimony:  The haiku.  A proposal made and answered within a specific time of year.
• Last Rites:  A sonnet of the passing of one who is beloved, in the arms of their lover.  This damn thing just about killed me to write, for by this point in the write I was inside the sphere of this love.  To one day be so parted from her will be unbearable.
• Ordination:  A triskadekian canto of how love is meant to be witnessed and proclaimed, that to love is like taking on the vestments and becoming an evangelist for the person you love.

Controversial, of course.  Beautiful, undeniable.  All my love to the light that passed through me to the page, my beloved Sunday Girl.