The beautiful Andrew and I have been talking tonight about poets and love, how words can be stones and water and the flesh can melt from bone with the music of them. I’m not like him, I can’t make sweet pictures to illustrate my devotion, my interaction between poet and penitent. I can barely explain to myself the words required to examine my pleasures. The people I love are too precious for shoddy description. I need to vivisect, dissemble the defences in place. I have too much evidence that it’s in the way. The poor man who slept with me last night, I attacked him in my sleep, waking suddenly out of dream to one hand pinning his backward and a muffled voice, “You’re a dangerous girl.” There must have been a trigger but I’m not even sure what it was. I assume a hand strayed in unconsciousness somewhere. I’ve not a clue. I simply know that my reactions have to calm down.
Isaac turned to me at the bar tonight, “So you must be Angela.”
What an illusion I must make.
My love, I want to drink him, upturn his body until the DNA unravels enough for me to catch an end with my teeth. I want to pull it straight and touch myself with the prickly strands, tie my wrists with it and offer them as supplication to sate his deepest desires. I want to dissolve into something formless, a drug (for him to taste with every moment of living joy) flaying pain away, stripping bare the tonal casing of every last tooth until I can hear the nerves sing with my breath. I can’t be sentimental in the face of such uncanny sweetness, of such bold moments of stolen heat. Leaving him home is as romantic as a chemical burn, as soothing as lye on the tongue. Leaving plays the nadir card, eclipsing all joy with indisputable depression, when will i see him again. This dreaming relationship, my blood is singing with it like the note has been found to make it vibrate and it carries his name. If I could, I would find a way to arc sparks from my two hands, amperage enough to make them burn, to make light enough to keep my guilty partisan desires hidden away in a darkened versailles cellar as filigree as a faberge creation. This is not strictly a predecessor problem, this is coaxing sensuous lips into a demonic pact. Wants versus respect, I am aware of an anticipatory incomprehension, this matter whittling itself down to release on the tip of our garnet minds. Hesitation closes doors and opens an ocean, I’m losing my heart like a debutante bride to the dilettante youth.