I really don't think you know
That sometimes while I'm sitting here with a hot cup of tea warming my hands, reading plays,
And you are beside me, writing poetry
With your sunset skin and midnight hair,
That sometimes I stop to watch your back as you work.
Your fingers fly over the keys
And your shoulders tense
And symphonies of velvet shadows play along them,
Cascade to the center of you and spill down beneath black lace.
(Oh, the maddening urge to touch
And see if you are an exquisite blend of strain and surrender.)
Sometimes I glance over there, and see you, sleek as a panther.
You know the delicious way their shoulders rise and fall,
Fluid, languid, full of glorious tension and barely contained power,
That is what I see in you,
Crouched on a crocheted blanket in a dorm room typing poetry.
How ordinary,
How extraordinary:
Sometimes I think you will spread wings
At any moment.
I think they'd be black and smooth,
Made of smoke and shadows and those little sparks that fall from cigarettes when you tap the ashes away like falling stars.
Sometimes I wonder how you'd sigh if I traced the hills and valleys of your shoulders with my fingertips,
With my mouth.
Sometimes I can almost hear it, almost feel it, and
I look back to my safe little lines of words
To steady my trembling mind.
All this comes over me
In the barest of moments when I happen to look up from my script briefly
And see you curled beside me, sensual and oblivious,
Typing that gravitational poetry
That I can never completely fathom.