The House Opens Its Doors

“I made a sanctuary of you...”

Domus Numeni began with perfume, song, and being stuck in traffic.

At the time, I did not imagine I was beginning a ninety-poem collection with its own mythology, recurring voices, miniature narrative arcs, theological arguments, crusaders, goddesses, lovers, cooks, skeptics, and one particularly amused spectator watching the faithful march through town.

I was simply thinking about scents.

As a perfumer, this has always fascinated me because of how closely it resembles memory. A fragrance can remain after a person has gone. It can make a room feel lived in long after it has emptied. Incense, amber, sandalwood, myrrh, flowers, rain, smoke—all of these eventually became part of the language of the collection.

Then there were songs.

I kept thinking about prayers that sounded like hymns, poems that sounded like invocations, and devotion expressed through music. Songs became offerings. Voices became things that could be given, withheld, exhausted, or heard by something divine.

And then… there was traffic. Which is considerably less poetic, but hear me out!

Somewhere between perfume and music, while sitting in traffic, I began thinking about people passing one another, processions, roads, travelers, and people carrying something from one place to another.

We were on our way to Cagayan then, and once the traffic had slowed, and I had time to type on my phone without getting dizzy... apparently, my imagination interpreted this as permission to introduce crusaders.

From there, things escalated.

The collection began primarily as something intimate: lovers becoming sacred, memories being preserved like perfume, shrines being built around absence and devotion. But once In Nomine Tuo appeared, private devotion became public. One person’s worship could become a procession. A procession could become a crusade. A crusade required towns, soldiers, kings, ordinary believers, skeptics, cooks, heretics, and people who would rather watch the whole thing from a tavern.

What began as a house slowly became a world… which admittedly wasn’t what I planned.

Many of the poems were written individually and at random. Some eventually revealed themselves to be connected. Two poems became a small room. Four or five formed an arc. Certain standalones began to sound like the corridors between them.

Voices that had originally seemed unrelated started answering one another across the collection.

A worshipper promised to “give the gods their due.” Much later, an acolyte who had sacrificed too much demanded that the goddess “give him his due”.

Someone offered blood.

Someone else licked blood from his fingers.

A warrior eventually looked at everything he had done in the name of love and simply said: I quit. 

Elsewhere, gods themselves began answering back.

They objected to being blamed for violence committed in their names. They became lonely. They were misunderstood. Some were placed so high on pedestals that no one remembered to see the person beneath the divine halo.

That was when I realized Domus Numeni was no longer only about worship.

It began to ask what happens when love becomes entitlement, when sacrifice becomes proof, and when devotion begins to erase either lover or beloved.

But it never called devotion foolish.

There are still flowers. There is still incense. There are songs, blessings, tenderness, ordinary prayer, erotic reverence, loyalty, memory, and joy. Some people pray and then simply return to their homes.

That is perhaps the message the House began to convey:

Love may make things sacred, but that must never cost us the ability to see clearly. Love deeply. Revere if you must. But keep your conscience and your self, and let the beloved remain a person. 

Or, in the language the House itself gradually learns:

Do not disappear at the altar. 

Come down from the pedestal. 

Meet me halfway, my love.