My Body Is a Castle Made of Sand

I tell you I hate you but that’s only because you turn me on and pushing you away is a good way to ensure you stick around, if only for the game. There are black birds circling in a winter white sky as gray swaths of thin clouds move swiftly in the opposite direction. Something invisible but razor sharp in the atmosphere plays with my body like ten thousand tiny hot pin pricks, an energy live as electric wires and I can taste the heat in my mouth. There are moving cars and street lights streaking haphazardly across the wet blacktop as I remember the first time we gave in to our darkest temptations, like two predators with nothing left to sink our teeth into except each other. I like the way you look at me when you know what you want and how you want it and won’t put up with anything less. The chaos swirling in your hungry eyes is the only sight in this frightening world that calms the fear which claws inside me all the time. As you grasp the back of my neck, I feel the cruelty of the ages slide off of me along with my tee shirt and torn up jeans. All the mental brutality of living which I carry around with me all day, kneading it constantly between my fingers and my shoulder blades, falls like meat off the bone. I’m so much more tired than I let on, I’ve been fighting my whole life it seems, to get out of my own head, to spit in the face of convention and crawl away from the terrible of gray cinder block walls and coffee stained hallways that snake through the dead buildings in this miserable city. The pain in you, that’s what I want to taste the most because it’s the only way to know this feeling is genuine. The way that you make me ache all over splits me open, and I need that in ways only you can understand. You like that when I come to you I’m willing, so you can work my body until it is worn waif thin.  When we merge, we kiss until our bones beg for relief. Sex is death is a way to erase each other and disappear.  Let me break you, baby, let me break you slow. There is a cigarette burning in smoky silence on the nightstand and a hole in my heart where love should be but I prefer a little emptiness. What is love anyway but a vanishing, a marked figure stalking in shadows. There is a fence around the walls which guard my heart for protection. In the fading evening light, I pull on your beat-up cotton shirt, and arrange some flowers in a vase while sipping on the whiskey warming in your glass. Every fleck of dust is my breath suspended, every creak in the floor boards is a lover who has walked away. As you are gazing out the window which overlooks an empty tree lined street, I place my hand on your stomach. We are no fairy tale, you and I, this I have always known. But just for a time, when this life gets under my skin, when I don’t know what I believe in or if standing at the gate I’m looking outside or in, I lay my head in your hands and let you pretend to call me home.