What I feel for you

rewrites the meaning of desire;

I long for your touch like I'm the leaf

awaiting the soft morning dew or the sand

for the ocean waves.

When you touch my body

my heart is rewritten;

encoded with your name, again and again,

until your name is the only one it knows.


What I feel for you

rewrites the meaning of desire.

Gently, I wake from your side.

I love your serene face on the pillow,

The soft, fluttering eyelashes on cheeks,

The strong, resting hands tucked underneath.

But I won’t kiss you, or touch you for

I don’t wish to disturb your dreaming,

So, I watch, and I smile up at the light.

It happens every morning, this feeling,

and I think just isn’t she the sweetest human?

A new page turns:
it’s midnight
and all I see are dreams and glimpses of her,
the ink from her snake tattoo
dark on her wrist like a passing shadow,
lean fingers layered with gemstone rings,
jade feline eyes swallow me and spit me out.

I want to pull you in,
and trace the ink written on your skin.
It feels like stories to me,
pages and pages of words
transcribed along the flesh of Aphrodite.
And, oh, to touch with is untouchable—
the more I long for you, the more the venom
of longing seeps into my untouched heart.

Once again
I am captured
Struck by the rose,
enraptured by the thorn.

I see your reflection in
ivory paper,
and the crown of your sweet head
like a blanket of fallen snow.

Does it matter, I wonder,
if you were truly alive or truly living?
For in these pages I can see your image
as truly as if it were a branding in my head.

The gentle ***** of your shoulders,
the dark and twisted curls-
Now see, you begin to see her too-
the small & delicate hands,
with crooked ring fingers,
the intuitive eyes.

And perhaps if I call Aphrodite,
down from the sea foam
and have her fair lips kiss these words,
I can have you materialize in my breath
and echo into my arms,
a statue no more.

Or perhaps I will lie a fool
my thumbs and forefingers obscured by ink
and your skin that of clay
detached and resolute.

You who stirred the words into my soul,
Brought them to life, animated them
With allegory and wit.
As if the Nine Muses had sung to my ear,
And Calliope herself had donned me
With the poems she'd once writ.

Or Sappho of ******, among secretive violets,
Absorbed by the lyre, she pens to revive it;
Not the song, or the tune,
But the calm way the song moved
The violets across the field-
This inspiration, she could wield.

Don't you see now, how it's not poetry the poet will choose?
For every poem the poet pens one shall require an equal Muse.

I’ve lived in a thousand lives,
seen a thousand faces;
I’ve walked the shoes of fairies,
carried adrift by silk strewn laces.

I’ve kissed a thousand suns,
beguiled a thousand moons;
I’ve danced on the arms of Queens,
crown jewels shimmering in the afternoon.

I’ve seen a thousand worlds,
yet yearn for a thousand more;
for it is these stories that bind my soul
to the living world beneath my door.