Let me unseal the kiss I sealed with silence
the warmth of her breath,
not yet turned to myth.
She was flame and fragrance,
skin spun from the stormlight of nebulae,
laughter that left bruises,
and hands like prophecy upon me.
We touched as gods might touch
without fear of ending,
without care for meaning.
But I meant it.
I tasted her like the first fruit of a dying star,
and I wept after, though she never saw.
I wept because I knew joy like that
cannot be forgiven.
Oh, to taste again that salt behind her knees,
to lose myself in the trembling of her wanting
before I bow to sorrow,
before I chant my sins in the tongue of penitents,
let me have that memory in full.8
Let me feel it again,
as one last sin,
before I learn to beg.
(Hidden in the structure of the stanza - specifically in the progression of the senses: taste, touch, weep, tremble, beg - is a sensory sequence cipher. To one who decodes it through biometric attunement, it suggests a means of contact through simulated sensual memory: a long-lost neural bridge hidden in the relics of Lyrax’s former life, now dormant but traceable through emotional resonance.)