the map

There is a reason all those old maps were full of monsters. A reason for myths expected to be met, an inking in of the unknown with all those hopes and fears. That lapsed passage, that hold of memory so deep that it mingles with departed dreams and notions of breath and grasp. The place where thoughts go so deep that they will not be measured, changed as they are by the darkness and the depths. And so your hands remember what your mind might have lost. Your lips are painted with all those salted secrets, things your tongue and teeth know, though your history denies. The layer where flesh and fable mingle, where I linger with-in you now.

All the morning mirrors will tell you, every warm shower and cold meal. All the steam whispered from murky coffee, all the kisses evident on the rims of cups and glasses. The press of weather, that weightlessness the moment before it rains. Something flung from an umbrella, something lingering on a windshield beneath the rhythm of wiper blades and the seething of the rain. A gray condensation where your soul is slipping against a frozen window, a handprint sticking to skin of the well worn door. My touch lives there, between your skin and that first hint of clothing. Beneath that tide of sensation, in the stretch and yawn of every living day. Fingerprints in the unshared depths, red ochre marking your secret walls. Feast or famine, the shadow of devour always waiting to arise.

There is always a way for the familiar to fail you, a way to get lost inside a well worn path, a thickening of the cosy wood, a density to the change in the weather. A verse forgotten in a familiar song, the close embrace of that certainty of other eyes. The world was written without us, making us up along the way. In pursuit of solace or passion or safety or risk, we are entangled irrevocably. The sleeping stash of neurons, the electric sensation of the ever other self-- the watchmaker, the time-keeper, the wish-stealer-- forever whispering just out of earshot. We are tattooed in invisible ink, the stories of other senses, of wants left inside from the other travelers that abound in the rooms and roads of our cluttered lives. That furtive claim your flesh aims towards moonlight, that taste of salt and heat that lingers between dreams. I live still in those hidden places, barely breaking surface. The tension upon the waters, the hungering in the wind.