That Sweetness You’re Made Of

She tells me she warns her young son that if he masturbates his penis will fall off. Keeping my thoughts to myself, when I try to make the coffee it’s old and stale before it even starts. The sickness in my stomach makes me gag a little bit. Out the window, which is actually a floor to ceiling wall of glass towering high above the city, the bright winter sun glares obnoxiously off the windows and steel beams of the other high rise buildings across the street. What exactly do we think shame protects us from? Or do we just like the perverted humiliation, turn it into fetishes to fuel another spawning seedy industry. Doesn’t matter to me, as far as I’m concerned seedy is just another welcome escape from the real mess humanity has made. Likely imperceptible to others, something in the way the day shines while she is speaking cruel words makes me want to cringe and wretch and curl into myself until all the screaming insanity stops. People are often telling me things I don’t want to hear while other people are busy ignoring the people in their lives who matter most. Just getting through a day of regular conversation, the smiling and nodding as it all goes to hell in a plastic bag of burnt coffee grounds can drain what little life you have left sliding through your impermanent veins. The only relief is the ink and the drink. There is a poet I adore who can slay you in only a handful of words. The philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer once said that, “talent hits a target no one else can hit; genius hits a target no one else can see.” She is a genius in every poetic sense, she touches you in places you didn’t even know existed within you but which had been aching since your time on this burning planet began. Each syllable expertly selected, carved out of obscurity and offered up like a beautiful sacrificial kill. She is blood in your gums, she is sex melting on your tongue. Drifting off into the safe danger of my own mind, in the static blackness I imagine a heavenly host of pure white doves, the sky is gray and endless as the low clouds move in and cover a quiet earth laid bare in shadow. Upon the dead grass, a circle of enchanting young women, open, supple, elegant gowns slipping off shoulders as they stroke and admire each other. A painting by a crystal running brook, a kiss which stands still forever in a heart which is free, a sliver of desire captured in silk. Maidens enraptured beneath an impending storm. The nature of the woman, erotic, mysterious, eternal. Perhaps the gods had stirred the skies to excite them, draw their bodies close to be soothed and discovered. Innocence. Corruption. Penetration. Poetry. Sappho. “What cannot be said will be wept.” I want to run my tongue along your fair collarbone, take the taste of you into me deeply, that I may become honey, flowing rich and thick in heated streams. All day the world is too bright, angel, sharpening my edges. But in the dark folds of this velvet night, feathered and dim, I make myself again soft for you.