// dysmorphia //

The inverted hollow in your disloyal eyes, dry plum wine soaked into cream linen flowing from tables left empty in gilded ballrooms, the staleness of your vacant mouth even after all this time, smoking and keeping your perverse thoughts to yourself. As you slide your fingers along my jaw, those snow white glimpses of my pale flesh still flutter in a desolate place that has curled itself inside my ribs for protection. Half my heart is a leather bound journal burning under a stack of wooden tombs, orgasmic oceans lapping at angel corpses on Jupiter.

We move like a headless dance without hands without eyes, stimulate, arouse like secrets traded and kept in steel drawers with the keys locked inside. All is static, penetrating. Undressing in silence, the cruel pace of the city is mute as I watch for the stars through tall windows, touching myself to the coming dark.

I am after, before, within all of it as trembling limbs, shards of my lifeless body in the fibers of that lace trimmed linen, traces of my voice on the lips you use to speak the words I could never let escape from my throat. You remember me because I line my eyes in charcoal even on the good days. The things that haunt you are never the things you can bury. It’s what is just out of reach that mauls you, just beyond the thin veil of the tolerance of what is no longer possible, those are the phantoms you keep in the chamber of the blood.

Those tremors, that pain, that hurt, that ache which stabs at the air in vain, that is the love story which must be written in the euphoric journals of the clandestine prophets, in the war torn diaries of the chariot gods.

We are not entirely of this world. In a flickering place within our wandering souls, inside a layer of resonance where even the cold stillness of the moon widens in the face of our marked vigilance, we know it. We can taste the almost imperceptible distance between the surface and what grows beneath; it fascinates the parts of us that would teach us everything we want to know if we would just listen with everything we have.

Union, creation, deliverance, freedom, these are the strange intricacies of true devotion. This is what it is to cherish, to attend to the calling, dissatisfied, hungry, uncertain. To fall into our own arms and breath from the depths of who we are far beyond what they’ve told us we owe them.

You stand naked against my back, I open my mouth and curse the petals falling in lush cascades across my tongue. This is what it is to bleed, even the piercing of thorns is the thrust of ecstasy.

Careful how you touch me, love, nothing about this will ever be enough.

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