The Gift of Carnal Desire

She doesn’t come to visit except briefly, after long periods of
time.
She brings smalls gifts of her body to me to savor in sips.
Like the allowance of my fingers through her hair soft as silk
from her shampoo,
Smelling of peaches and honey and vanilla and sugar, the
scent shifting with her mood.
The shape of her foot in my lap, the nails of the toes shaped
perfectly and pink underneath,
I slip my fingers into the spaces in between and she’s so soft
in the folds of hidden flesh.
She gives me the gift of her eyes staring into mine, looking
away, looking back,
Wide and scared and big and brown, with a dusting of yellow
flecks like gold.
She brings her breasts formed from the sculptor’s clay as she
stands topless in the kitchen,
The smell of food sizzling on the stove wrapping her up in the
warmth as the early sun rises in the window.
For my birthday and Christmas I ask for her lips and hands
pressed against me.
Things that she won’t give away like her ears and legs and
buttocks and cunt,
Things that she wants to keep for herself because she doesn’t
trust me to handle them with care.
If I ask nicely she’ll surrender her entire body to me in the
dark
Because neither one of us is a whole person and when we
join together we’re even less in the worldview.
I’ve spent whole nights tasting her flesh, the salt coating my
tongue until it becomes a dried organ,
Until I wake up in the morning and it’s my own skin I am
now eating.
Then she’s gone from me like a phantom or a fevered dream
in my restless sleep.
I begin to wonder if she was ever there to begin with, the
sound of her voice echoing in my mind
And in the floorboards of the hall where I step out to check
the knocks of my prankster ears.
I pay the bills and I watch TV and I eat two day old lasagna
from the pan as I forget.
Then I reach across the bed in the early hours to the cold
spot I was so sure she’d occupy this time.
I begin to move away and move on with my life again,
showering and dressing in nice clothes.
I meet someone new who lacks in personality and charm but
makes up for it with a nice rack.
We have our thing together and fling our bodies at each
other like it was the last thing we were meant to do,
But it never lasts, and someone new is always gone from my
life as quickly as they came.
I begin to sink down because it’s the only place that offers me
comfort anymore.
If I drink heavily enough I know I won’t remember,
And if I take the pills in the medicine cabinet I’ll be too numb
to feel the pain as I forget.
But then she comes back to me again, stepping across the
threshold like she never left in the first place.
She teases me with yet another piece of herself and the tears
of her latest failed tryst with the real world.
Maybe I can convince her to stay this time, that we’re as
good for each other as it’s ever going to get.
We’re far from perfect and God knows any other time we
could do so much better
But her arms and wrists and hands and fingers and nails
wrapped around behind my back
With her face pushed up close to mine
Feels like the sun coming through the clouds for a split-
second when it’s been raining all day
And for once you look up from the muck at the gray clouds
lined with gold
And you see a world where you can live and exist and go
from day to day
Without the reminder that this life is no longer the one you
want to lead
Until death in a cemetery lined with hedgerows and the fallen
petals of wilting flowers.