Turn On

Something in the precise words you use to describe the sharp lines of a powerful city you’ve just been visiting half way across the globe makes me believe that if you took me to bed you would know exactly what to do to make me come undone. It’s not just the body it’s the mind and you are quite the master of twisting both so as to cause every nerve ending to stiffen to attention. The way with those eyes you penetrate every breath I ever took until right this moment but now I don’t care if I get five million more or ten I just need you to keep talking. As I listen, patient and impatient like an itchy cat studying the movement of her prey, you tell me about the natural and constant chaos spinning itself outward further and further into the outer most rungs of the universe. Nestled in the dim candle light glow of my living room, it is well past midnight, there’s a half pack of cigarettes, various bottles of wine, and the many stacked rings on your fingers are flashing like planets in a small distant galaxy as you motion with your long thick fingers toward the glittering night sky out the window. The wine having sedated me, I’m trying to follow the course of your lesson which sounds more like a boyish aspiration, a tale of adventure and discovery, I’m falling into the vast blackness of the shirt you’re wearing, the leather belt you have fastened lightly around your waist, the charcoal smudges barely visible around the rims of your tired eyes. You love women almost as much as you love yourself. To hear you tell it there have been any number of them, each one languid, beautiful, in possession of a sweetness which can only be birthed of both strength and submission, not to you necessarily but to a passion which you are uniquely able to stimulate between the two of you such that everything else becomes meaningless and instantly falls away. Though you have never been mine and likely never will be, something strange inside me rejoices to know of the lust you treasure for these women, for yourself, for art, for the magic inherent in life itself. Because you understand science, you understand chemistry which means you understand how to manipulate, to agitate. Experiment. Control. Study. As the words fall softly from your wide sensual mouth, I imagine you are tired but ignoring it, the whiskey has you humming inside and all I can think is nothing and all I can feel is every cell in my body suffocating with desire. Tell me, stranger. Tell me everything you know and everything you dream about. Tell me your secrets. Speak to me of the laws of physics which cause the stars to spread themselves like a glistening womb, mysterious, dark, pulsing, eternal. Your voice grows low and you are nodding off and I’m losing you to yourself as I always have and always will. How I wonder what it would be like to crawl inside that mind of yours, to see what you see through the mad brilliance of a man who loves so many things, who finds himself in ridiculous awe of a world I only want to leave behind at every turn.