Sweet Sweet Dreams

Clutching for the sky, I slide down alongside the rain as I imagine your kiss turns bittersweet, from sugar to some sort of chemical, like swallowing mercury. The crickets are still buzzing loudly in the darkness of early morning, crackling in the grass like fire. As you disappear I find myself alone again in a crumpled bed, strewn with white linen I have to kick my sticky legs free from due to the unbearable heat.

Unsure if the sweat which slicks my entire body is brought on by the thickness of the humidity which sags through the window and soaks everything damp, or night sweats brought on by either the advance of age or the increase of drink, I peel off all my clothes and lie naked at the center of the bed. The center of the universe beats at the center of my body, as though my heart were located somewhere closer to my navel than my chest.

The mind wanders in these predawn hours. I consider the lost works of Sappho, words lush with pleasure-pain, ripe, swollen with longing, even still, made haunting through their absence.  Their suggestion becomes obsession with interpretation, extrapolation, possibility. Perhaps this is the single common human desire. Our want of the wanting. Our desire for the desire. Our thirst for the neediness and greed.

Sweet-hard thoughts of masochism, sadism, wanton women, hungry men. The feral, the animal, the degrading, the way only pain can satisfy the deep psychic cravings tucked within the folds of our darkest secret pleadings. Imaginings of orgies in days long gone by, humanity, divinity, perversions of beauty and sin, lost to the ruins of time, air, salt, sea. These musings blur into the blue haze of the dewy morning glow.

As my skin cools, sleep descends all around me, slows my breathing. Each desire becomes the mist of the dream. Each dream, a white paper boat I watch set out upon the dark and unrelenting waves.

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Photo by Engin Akyurt