#cleanballad

Kiss me gently, my heart trembles with love The gift bestowed upon it so sweet, so kind, I shiver and sigh in sweet repose and feel my love for you curling upwards at my lips

Scalding heat, fervor rise Wakened lust hoods heavy eyes

Love moves through you with every beat of your pulse, twines through your bones like an embrace;

There’s a perfect house with a crack in the ceiling.

In the night, a servant diligently collects dead hares from the fields. By the morning there isn’t a single corpse left in the grass. The rich suffer no consequence for the trail of bodies in their wake.

There are brave boys who climb in through windows, who are only allowed to love in the night. When they touch, the strings shriek in horror. The orchestra recoils in fear of rejection, of violence, of vulnerability.

Your ex-lover turns tail on the cricket pitch and runs back to the safety of his stumps, to his marriage, to the shackles of his estate and title. He stops dreaming.

When the cracks widen and the water comes through the ceiling, it pools in the pianoforte he first fell in love over. He tuts at the nuisance, and turns his back. You move the piano with another man, and fall in love again.

What is more godly than the love of another? Surely you can hear the choir, too?

You have both my eyes, Both my hands, And all of my heart.

split open my skin like overripe fruit, suck my blood out of my veins and spit it onto the concrete, teeth grimaced and red with his venom

climb out of myself, naked and new be the progeny of my own bloodline,

Without your heart next to mine, my chest is rent open and empty. The cavity must hang agape; I fear it a grotesque sight.

I don't recognize myself in the sound of my wailing - when I force my mouth closed and swallow that grief, it presses against my sternum insistently. It will find its way out, one way or another.

I am wracked with shivers that shoot through me, pooling quicksilver-cool under my wrists. My nails leave crescents in my scalp.

Will the rattling ever gentle?

Or worse - what if it does die? What if my body moves on? I couldn’t bear it. I might rather be stuck like this, shivering in the cold space where your love should be warming me. Then I at least am comforted that my body remembers yours.

Besides, if you stop shivering - doesn’t that mean you are closer to death?

I turn my head towards you, as a flower does to the sun

And I let the petals of my gentleness unfurl