sleep cycles stuck on repeat
She fell asleep in my arms last night.
“You can cuddle me if you want”
My form folded against hers,
our two bodies,
four knees
bent in echoes of the other.
She shook off consciousness
with the aftershocks of her seismic activity during the day.
She is the epicenter of my shifting surface--
the origin of the scraping of my tectonic plates,
her twitches ricochet tidal waves of lust,
tsunamis of confusion in the comfort of her touch.
She dances into sleep,
muscles shaking on the strings of some greater marianettier than me.
I want to tug at her strings better than this two-bit, two-am puppeteer.
I imagine what my arms, my hands
--now wrapped around her sleeping form--
could do to make her twitch to a different tempo,
how I could make her breathing rise and fall much more rapidly--
How I could make her moan in quarter time.
I like to think that I would know all the moves,
but I know that I would most likely fall into following her lead,
her hands so much more sure than mine,
my inexperience catching on the ragged edges of my breath
coming too fast,
(if only) in the present tense.
Back on earth, we are spooning in the middle of my spinning
cinema-reel alternate realities,
surrounding our bed with my weak what-if fantasies.
I bore holes into the back of her perfect neck
wishing I could disappear into sleep cycles as easily as she.
But for now my mind is stuck spinning re-runs
unlikely ever to make it to the big screen,
or the red carpet of my mouth.
God knows I’ve written enough scripts to cover my bedroom
two times five times ten times over
and over filling imaginary mouths
with black and white skeletons of the forever unsaid.
I bury their bones in silence because
I’m afraid that when I tear the tape from my lips
my words will slip out as mangled as unbound feet
wrapped from the age of three,
limping and wrinkled,
clumsy in their attempts to form sentences,
each word
-shaky-
and unused to following the others in line.
The truth is, she shook me to my bones.
Seismic sounds made my ear drums shift like plate tectonics
leaving deafening questions ringing in the un-worded silence:
Whose fault-lines are more volatile?
Whose body will buckle first under this tectonic tension?
And if our fault lines do eventually grind dextrally against each other,
--will the whole Earth move?
Or will we only be able to feel our foundations shaken at the epicenter
of what we’ve imagined to be a dance of entire continents?
You can measure the magnitude of an earthquake,
but I keep drawing blanks when trying to define
exactly what this is.
I know the facts of our correspondence,
I can count the number of days I have thought of her,
I can measure the weight of her body between my arms.
She fell asleep in my bed last night.
My mouth
said
so
much
silence.
