I hate the way you write. How you expertly unmask a thing I never felt worthy enough to claim. Baby teeth, bare breasts against a bare back shallow breathing, strip swimming in the lake behind my house on the last golden pages of summer. The red crest of dawn raining along the ocean waves, the space between my fingers as it wraps around your cigarette transporting it from your soft lips to mine.
The way I bite when I kiss you.
All of it makes me want to develop the codes that would bring entire global systems down. Nervous systems, subway systems, government, technology, religion, media, everything with screaming walls you cannot see but feel dividing up the cold chambers of your soul as you sit in bars blinking at screens trying to erase yourself.
I whistle your love songs and imagine pulling the plug on every light across the globe so all that is left to guide the lonely through the blackout streets are white electric clouds sweeping through tree limbs made windy of stars.
I do not know if this is love but the way you rise makes me want to shut everything down.
I want what you have to spread its million mouths wide inside my veins not to taste me but to breed into me, to bleed into me your terrible miraculous insides, to become a thing no one else can touch. An animal which cannot be given a name but all the sorrowslain people, they would give every last breath from their disintegrating lives for just one moment to be this new creature that we are. They would reach for us with beautiful hands as we vanish into the ether.
I wish I could say this in a way that reflects the way it is smoldering on the underside of my trembling tongue, with more elegance, with more grace. So I don’t sound so much like I’m full of grease and some kind of snaked inky greed but there it is. The truth is a gaping black chasm gouged in the table between us. I cannot help but follow my dark thoughts and they have led me here to you, to this crumbling naked room. The air between us growing thin, trying to get out the same way we got in, but the sand falls in too fast.
Two butterflies trapped in an hourglass falling from the sky.
As we observe each other’s bodies but do not speak, the doors of the past all close behind us and disappear.
Here we sit wet and glistening underground, here is the pit of my stomach of fangs and fears. My love, here are my hands and my heart and my sickness.
I beg of you for both of us: start digging.
.
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Allison Marie Conway 