communal construction
The dearest, sweetest boy (@imsorrythings) asked me to do a collaborative writing exercise with him, so I magpied a bunch of his lines and made something new. I feel like his loveliness carries the whole thing, but I certainly made contributions. If you read through his poems, you’ll see what I mean -- I really just dismantled and rebuilt. Remixed, if you will. Anyway:
Bathed in the bluelight, you soak my shoulders in your godsent spit spun as silk until I am dandelion-fragile, my delicate fur denuded by your breath. The night turns over as in sleep and our breathing syncs, the love we make a pause between bludgeons and blessings dealt to us at random, the both of us primed to detonate on contact.
This want is a granite kick to the skull as you sink down to your knees beside me in the long grass, a soft word on your tongue; a benediction, a hasty hallalujah filling my mouth like blood-red wine. I falter, I slide. I refine your lines until all protestations transform into poetry – a sonnet, maybe, maybe a requiem for who we might’ve been back then, before our love’s million little deaths.
Softly, you rip me open, flood me with your fragrance until my lungs erupt. I put my hand on my chest to feel the point of entry, this sucking wound you’ve left me with. I stand stripped before you, a minuteman waiting for his bayonet, empty hands making helpless fists in the air.
I offer my blood to you in each breath, knelt down at your feet, jealous even of the carpet coiled beneath your toes as you weaken me in your lavender, your honey, your milky exhalations. I beg that you might climb inside me, wear this ragged body like a coat of armor. There is a clean, well-lighted space below my sternum I’ve prepared just for you – my heart a throbbing drum echoing down from up above, a sinful postcard from God licked like a stamp and fixed against the wall.
Supine, I sleep steady beneath your swaying limbs, ever-waiting for you to collapse into my lap, to make satin my sharp edges. Hopelessly I hunger, hands outstretched to touch you, touch you, but you become the sweltering breeze, whistling through the spaces of my fingers. Desire comes but desolation lingers, a lonely incantation wind-whispered into my bent ear as you turn to smoke and disappear.
