object permanence

These busy hands sometimes stay empty for days. These greedy fingers are never too far from the choicest plum. The vagaries of some mythic skin, the lost notions of your face pressed into my palm, the ghost of tense and tension go clambering through my brittle nerves. These chains dragged up hollow stairways, each link a bone, a tooth, an instance of blessed flesh. The feelings lingering so long after even memory has gone.

A finger to your lips though I want everything from you but silence, precious breath condensing upon the traces of my fingerprints left. Words that turn the silvered mirror a soft enduring gray, oaths that dissolve like sugar dolloped upon a restless tongue. The scent of your hair whispered with sweat, the whole of you glistening above the drift and twist of those abject sheets. A kiss upon your throat while you softly spoke, the shelter of a dark room, the luster of the rain. Your voice moving through my set teeth, some small flavor nesting in my lips.

It is only puzzling in this plenitude, these strong bones and long stares of yours that live still in the tomb of my wrecked and savaged flesh. Steadily I untie the knots and string the stars through the stretch and pause of your spine. The sky rollicks and weeps, its freezes and sparkles and goes about its business. My hands cleave and crease, their myriad works and schemes wrought from earth and ether. Yet you wrest these fevers from beneath the price upon my eyes, your electric presence always here in the empty air, in this tale of age and weather. So vibrantly entombed in this worthless shamble, you hold your breath in that blessed smile, proving something about love or sensation, or the way we sway the shape of this hapless world.