The moment of falling is a peaceful eye of exultation
within the much-larger, inside jarring storm.
You cannot tell it yet. Now,
you have begun again to count widening spaces
between the rolls of essential thunder, spaces
larger than one sees during time of understanding.
You would explain to the rest of course but
you have already admitted your fading divorce
from the eyes of the tempest.
All you know really is that it all comes down,
strangely, in folds,
when you're sleeping so well because you've just fallen sarcastically in love.

You know that your previous attempts to grasp
your own understanding have been failures:
You had as of yet done nothing but grab blindly
for unwilling flesh, the sweat hanging from your own soft arms.
        You know
you should have been busily seeking
your acquiescence, your smiles, the changing smiles
of the ladies that live, waiting, within you.
The physical manifestations of your torture
are only the salt trails of your thoughts, dreamt nightly
until you awaken with red blisters on your hands and feet
from where you've been,
and your selves are all named, and waiting, and,
ladylike, they continue to wait.
They wait as you do and will, until you've learned to grow tired, at last,
of watching the swelling and regenerating of
sour rose petal abrasions from your palms,
the marks of your willing debasement.

Your discovery of yourself is a pacific shock.
You begin to construct floorboards of diamonds.
Their clarity and purity will reflect your ankles,
your knees, the opaque bits forgotten in your transmutation
into a personification of virtuous longing.
Even your knees won't disgust you now, so closely used,
        so often kneeled upon--
now protected, core, surrounded by a shield of real violence.
The stare into fresh crystalline eyes
leaves the vision of your life nearly requited
and as you are fixed in the gaze of such a one,
you declare, silently and with many tears, I feel so honest,
knowing only afterward what you still wish to hide,
what face you still ache to swathe in veils.

Every moment severed from that look is anguish, is it?
Every disconnection now is pain if you've ever felt it?
To have such cognition for the smallest of instants is to sob,
        I have never known filth,
to shout, I am worthy of this steely, penetrating gaze!
You wanted to be desecrated, you loved all the world best
when you were pushed down and grinned at,
every man you encountered finding you in your weakness.
When you look long into such eyes you understand:
I am not desecrated. I have never been pushed down.
In moments lived in comprehending eyes,
these things that did excite you once, in your lust
to punish uncommitted crimes, will drop away,
perhaps even content at last to love you from a distance,
your own self-loathing no longer to kiss your lips with the taste
of embers and oil.
You will see yourself, finally,
beneath a muddy protective layer of submission, dominance, sarcasm...
and say, I am something wonderful, without fear,
without a cringe or tremor.
The only thing left for you will be the agreeable responsibility
to go to your benefactor with your new knowledge--
to offer it in gratitude.

When you begin to doubt your reception, however,
the panic may only grow.