Upholding Nowruz “Proprieties”

I do not invite you to sit across the table — and I on this side — in a café. Because the length of the table is far too great a distance for our hands. This distance is far too great for our tongues — alive in the closed shell of our lips — and for a love; because love is a blazing longing in a bed; hotter than the glass of tea that will be taken at the table, upholding the established “proprieties,” on a cold winter afternoon, respectfully, with the formal “you,” in a café... Because love is the hot longing of frozen lips on a warm body with nothing between naked, naked in a bed; and not something like the furrow of a wound before everyone’s eyes on my forehead and not something like the mark of the great plow’s claw in hope of a future harvest on the body of the earth — my body — because love is a flag of white jasmine in the hand of the wind naked, before everyone’s eyes, on the vast bed of the earth; and it is a votive rag torn to pieces — my soul — that weeping I tie to the shrine of your body with my hand and with my lips in bed; hoping for nothing in no future but the sense of union; and so, holier than any saint I call you — upholding the “proprieties” of love — from behind all the tables of the world from all the borders to my bed to my heart I, from this side of the earth at Nowruz...