Bite Marks

It’s a life of destruction and regeneration. Of chopping off dead limbs and planting new seeds deep inside the dark soil of the earth, and as I breathe in the cold clear air of another day spent wondering what it’s all worth, for a few moments in broad daylight I am satisfied. Naked trees and light blue sky. Most people don’t think this much about things that are taken for granted by the many, but since I’ve been talking to you for days and nights on end I start to think our thoughts have become tangled up with one another’s and taken on a strange and curious life of their own. How many people does one meet in a lifetime? Thousands? Tens of thousands? And how many of those people are any real factor in altering the very narrow course of your life? When was the last time someone crawled underneath your skin and pulled at the empty, aching places in your soul? It is not an infinite number, maybe it’s one person, maybe it’s three or five if you are exceedingly lucky. Something in the way your eyes move made me let you in which is not to say that I trust you, but for some possibly very unsavory reason, I want to know more about what makes you tick. What you taste like hard and vulnerable in the dark. What you are afraid of and what makes your insides smolder like a crimson sunset sinking into the soft body of the wide open ocean. What you read about that makes you believe we are worth more than just a glance at one another passing as strangers do in the crowded city streets. As we share a bottle of wine while facing each other in front of a crackling fire, you go from explaining a theory about the nature of stars to describing the way you can identify my exact scent even in your dreams. The way your body curves toward mine and your hands form the shape of two crescent moons, I am searching you for answers that lie beneath your surface. You have a way of saying one thing when you mean another and though you won’t admit it and neither will I, I can’t stop my heart from racing when presented with a challenge. My mouth is wet for you, my skin floods hot for you. You are a puzzle, a maze of mirrors, walls, dead ends, tunnels that call to me to find a way out of being left for dead with nothing but sickened mornings and broken promises. There is a depth to you which is unlike any other. An abyss into which many surely have fallen never to return again. Willing to burn out like the light of the stars you so adore, I cross my legs, bite my lip, and try to drown the panic in my stomach by ordering another bottle of Sav blanc. So many have brought me in so close, right before they turned on the heel of a descending season, and slowly walked away.