// i promise you this //

Collecting what’s left of you when it’s over is trying to keep a flutter of moth nerves alive in a shot glass between my teeth, but I don’t mind the knots in the stomach; perfection doesn’t interest me.

When I look at you I watch the passing of decades in blinks, frames of your limbs, centuries of humanity in ecstatic heat, angels sucking lollipops singing in haunting orgasmic tones, their celestial lips stained all colors of an erotic rainbow, worshiping the sun as it molds us into mystical creatures, no longer recognized with natural eyes.

You and I at dusk, watching dragons slip into a boiling turquoise sea, hold hands to form a bridge across the myths conjured to keep us apart. They never thought love could be such a twist and still be real. You are sustenance, food, truth. The desire you feed me catches mountains of leather books on fire, consumes and destroys all that’s cruel in a mindless world. I savor the way you taste like the dew on the grass of an ancient burial ground, touch like the climax of the Northern Lights.

Your body is a clever animal, a dark secret on the lips of a coming tragedy. Sinister, fleeting, a mystery to be respected for the delicate timing in which it unfolds. Your tongue is a velvet plunge, a warmth, a hearth in a place beyond this temporary home. Sins turn to pillars of beautiful glistening dust while every earth-bound creature wears the head of a lion underneath its fingernails, baring its blood thirst to the valleys of the moon.

Love is a ritual bath, a river carved through an underground tomb.

Quiet madness staring itself in a plush hungry mouth: you want me wet with curious struggle as a piano plays itself in an empty room.

The way the veins pulse down your neck is the way you dismiss the things that no longer matter to me, love is thinner than gossamer wings, slender heaven folded in its milky beats. We are exposed, skin peeling itself away from the bone, naked in a way no one else can understand for you and I have mirrored the birth of each other; we, held and released in silhouette dreams that began before the beginning, before there were words from which to choose.

The world ends the moment you remember when candles were tiny flickering stars flinching, licking at your fingertips, and I was dancing for you in the shadows, in the rise and fall of jewel-cuffed arms scratching against the concrete walls.

I adore the heavy smoke, the crimson choke of your handsome resistance.

Tracing my body slows the crumbling, you remove the silk along my sides and enter into me as the globe in all its casual blindness spins away from itself. Oblivion is thick nectar on the ivory altar of the gods, fame is for the fearful: only the brave will be devoured, forgotten.

Watching you from above is black feathers falling from a white snow sky.

Beauty is eternal, pleasure is a lifestyle, and I take my love stranger than most.

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