Love Letter To a Christian

I didn’t care about you.

What I cared about was the core of it, the purity—
that I would willingly offer up my ruin
to be baptized by that love.

I didn’t care about you 

such that when you left me 
broken by the bayou,
I didn’t read it for what it was—

I read you stained with love,
calling you just one of grief’s verdant skins. 

I didn’t care about you. 

I cared about the whiteness of feeling—
when being with you meant I didn’t have to feed my own thoughts 
and how you’d trace my nakedness in silence behind the milk of your eyes.

So when I was faced with the question 
of how to get around your absence

I cast my eyes down, all but fainted,
and disappeared into the abyss of grace. 

I didn’t care about the distance
when I could do this in remembrance of you.

Though I doubt you’d understand
which is how we end up back at the beginning,
which is to say

I didn’t care about you.

I didn’t want you as property,
or to make a temple in your bed.

I was holding for the humid,
more concerned with how “something sticky”
is an adjective I could apply
to both your vomit and your spit. 

How did you manage to fit a cross in my mouth instead? 

Perhaps because I was the one who fed you vomit, I suppose,
that summer in New Orleans,
when the reach of your dick resulted in such a gag reflex,
I had to pay my respects. 

I’ve always had a tenderness for the way mothers
regurgitate care into baby birds but

I guess, I just didn’t care about you.

I cared about the Plasmodial Slime Mold
that grew in the tea cup I left waiting for you
by the kitchen sink. 

Nettle and chamomile debris eaten
in web like patterns by living decay.
Pink, and sponge-like

I thought to myself
as it spread it’s tendrils across the liquid,
clinging to bubbled glass—

“God, what a lovely cunt.”

This is love’s body, which will be given up for you—
and how it quivered when I flushed it down that porcelain drain.