Burn for You

It’s all been done before and probably better than you can do it but that doesn’t keep you from trying. You scratch your palms and then your forehead but only because your gums itch and you can’t seem to get at where the itch is coming from. You are fidgety and wired from too much coffee, so you light up a cigarette and continue typing terrible prose into the empty void just to feel the keys clicking beneath your fingers. Somewhere in you deep down inside, you know this is where you are supposed to be, what you are supposed to be doing, word after word, trash or gold, thick or thin, the writing has kept you steady when absolutely nothing else in the world could do it. There is an itch in you that you can never quite scratch and it is torture and it is madness and it is beyond pleasure into some kind of masochism, but it often seems to you it is more than life itself. All the hangovers, all the lovers, all the failures, all the fantasies, they swirl in your rib cage like a drug or a sickness, like flowers blossoming forth, delicate and heavy with wetness in the soft mist of a rainy August evening years ago. You and I, bodies, tongues, whiskey, and the way my head tilted back as you whispered decadent words against my neck about the way I taste like the open ocean, a smoldering summer sunset beach. You bound my hands together at the wrists, raising them above my head, a single finger to your hushed mouth. Instruction. I suck my bottom lip, go silent as I struggle to hold in the sounds of pleasure I’m desperate to release. Gazing down at me as your fingers grazed and teased the center of my glistening ache. In your eyes, the endless darkness of midnight lakes, pools of sweet danger I drown myself in. At the mercy of your hands which played me until I was taut in glorious frustration, you twist me, dangle me, push me to my blinding limits. At the command of your naked desire, I laid before you exposed. Vulnerable. Hungry. Unashamed to become the embodiment of my need for you. Who in this world can you trust if not yourself. When you write you can fly but only if you write the things you are afraid to say. Tell the stories which flutter and bite at you. How afraid are you to die? How terrified are you of what you really want? How afraid are you that life has already passed you by? Taking a drag from your cigarette, you invite the smoke into your lungs and tap a crinkled clump of ash out the window which opens to the garden where you once had me, dirt stained, rough, our skin smooth with sweat in moon glow. Though these memories are now nothing more than time gone by, to you they mean something sacred. They have become a part of the way you move, the way you see things. You can still taste them, conjure them, almost reach out and caress them in all of the sensual experiences you crave. The way you touched me with control, measure, fascination, admiration. And as you raise your eyes, gray clouds move steadily over the black night sky, erasing all heavenly light. You can no longer see the stars. But you know that somewhere out there, beyond all time and space and eternity, they still burn.