I'm not the product you sought to buy. My "I've been used by dates" shows I should have been expired.

Yet still here on the shelf
stuffed to the back down the wrong aisle

my label is illegible but they still try to place me with their sloppy stocking hurting me more

All the scars becoming just damage to the packaging voiding warranties and wants of me.

Take me on discount.
I'm a steal.
All my values plundered
But never brought home.

We speak carefully
without naming body parts.  
As if the utterance of a word
could evoke touch – which would mean
hearts racing off in jolty cadences, sweat and
altogether too much skin.

We move with hyperawareness of our limbs.
The air ripples and reaches with each gesture
in phantoms of feeling.
I sense the edges of your fingers,
I cannot ignore the millimeters of
space between our knees.

Your mouth curves down at the edges,
when your gummy smile splits
at the things I say. I remember your lips.
I cannot put them away
in a part of me that locks.
Your mouth opening against mine –

your tongue slipping in.
Put it away.
Your mouth on the pulse below my chin.
Turning back in your doorway,
the dawn light white on your skin.
Put it away.

This wanting is something I can keep
like a mantra - a bed with you
won’t again be a bed for me.
Now we drink as strangers or friends
who once pressed their bodies against each other’s –
but heavy snow covers only blur the edges,

nothing disappears entirely.
We speak carefully

to hide the pump of blood and memory.

In the silence gain the strength from anger.

Then Bite the hand that feeds. Clench your teeth and watch them bleed.

Rip the arm straight from the socket, you don't need an owner.

Eat the ugly  face to erase the fear it once caused

Chomp down the heart that never held kindness

Consume the flesh piece by piece to swallow whole your hatred and sleep in peaceful happiness.

Life is born without shape.

****** out from one to become none

Fresh clay to be cast, spun, and molded

Folded in mother's arms she begins to give  form

With a kiss from the source the little form is claimed and a wrinkle above the brow is creased; the maker's mark.

New movement comes in each day stretching out the raw material and shaping more detail.

A mouth of questions spoken to fill in the scrawling words written inside. A hidden design with each learned answer

The world takes a turn. The work  is carved, scraped, and left scarred but still more beautiful in the details.

It sees others begin to set dry becoming stuck in their ways. So brittle now in their inflexibility.

Defiant to the end instead of being baked jumped into the water to become something new.

Eyes deceive and so I rely on something deeper than just vision.

Something with more depth than just whats between your thighs.

Don't spread your legs wide but unfurl your mind lay it out like a map so I may bear witness to the whole.

I gaze upon thoroughways of your thoughts and feelings, the canals of your being and viscera of the soul.

The rise of the hills and dive of the valleys etch a landscape beyond any other natural beauty.

Seek to memorize what has been charted by the artist named life making each of us a work of art.

To know more than with five senses so you can be touched beyond what these hands could ever hold.

You build your love like a sand castle

Stack it on high by the bucket

Enshrine it with walls built like pallisades

Dig the  moat by hand to keep out intruders

Decorate with a thousand scintillating shells to make a beacon on that beach

The storm always comes

The waves crashes

Washing away all but the memories

The world saw nothing but a tangle of wires and a blown out speaker blaring distorted sounds.

You saw promise beyond the coils of crossed cords.  You could reach through the distant disconnect and tune it all back in.

With gentle motions you Opened up the metal shell made to protect the more delicate insides.

There you dared the jungle of electric vines  to put order to this jumble. The strands of disarray combed straight by patient hands.