My soul just had a bath. Of the kind that has bubbles and champage and a naked lover. The moist warmth caressing the skin and his breath cascading down my neck; the candles sputtering orange, vermilion, azure and that eruptive tickle of his fingers and those poems he reads in that marijuana voice to closed eyes; the pores opening, the grime of regret oozing out into the rose-petal soaked ripples... a few snatches of Traumerei but I'm really not listening - there are passions, recriminations, fights, purulent regrets being exorcised: by the water, his presence, the flickering lavender-scented light. and there will be rain and solitude afterwards, wrapped in a blanket my soul towelling off into the dry, bright tubelit night.
The message is supreme;
Born in the heart,
and lilting itself
from tongue to tongue,
throwing its scent
over wind and wave;
travelling on dots
or fingers
when blindness
or silence bar its way.
It hews itself into stone
or burns itself onto magnetic discs;
it is the message that lives
and I exist
solely to pass it on.