Bad Things Inside Me

My habit is you, yet instead of taking twenty one days (is it twenty one, they say, to form a habit?) I was born already squirming with you in my tiny blue river veins. Wet, exposed, raw, helpless. Screaming. Eager. Starving. You, the womb I bathed and blossomed within. I see pink peonies, their lush petaled heads dropping heavy with morning dew. I see the sun coming up in soft tangerine behind the sap running amber down the trunks of green trees. Each one the texture, the scent, the presence of you. You are every commandment written in my skin, and every command on which I feed. The mornings are dull, the mornings are mournings soaked with gray rain, weeping from my eyes which are windowpanes. The days are mirrored, all sides of lost hope and lost minds, in all of this and through it, is you. I like the way Mary Oliver describes swimming in a cold lake at dawn, quiet and naked and alert among the reeds, the swans and the animals. I like the girl with the blog that nobody’s heard of, who writes about stabbing her boyfriend as they make love, he begs and begs for release. I like the torture. I like the tease. I like that I can smell it. In sex, in nature, in wilderness, in violence, I see only you. In an airport in a foreign city over run with disease, a man carries a bag which carries a bomb which is sniffed out and caught by a detective dog. In thickest fog which looks like a mountain which looks like the sky which looks like the sea, a flying machine slams into the air and explodes, ending everything. In the wreckage, in the ghosts of the souls exiting the flesh and the steel, in the coding of the fates of the extinguished, whispers you like cruel sadness, you like the final moments of terror, pure, sheer. You are the constant and the permanent, an expressionless pair of twin bodies which continue to twin, spinning and spinning without ever stopping. When I lie beneath him and part my legs, when I feel the slamming of his heart in his chest as his ecstasy pushes him over the edge, it is you in my mouth as my teeth tear his neck. Under my fingernails at the back of my mind in the warmth in the bottle in the smoke on my breath. This divine hellish perversion in me, the twisting of pleasure into blind aching need. The darkness I see in the monsters I breed all alone in my bed. Eyes shifting like curtains drawn while the storm rages on. Kiss of life upon the hands of death, feather of each shadowed dread. You.