Carnal Knowledge

Your lower lip needs to be a book-cover,
Dog-eared, pink-papered, full with knowing,
My fingers will never stop with the preface,
They will grab your jaw where it falls away,
Pull your flesh down its slow cherry path,
Fetch your eyes from their cloudy heights
into cupped hands that wander your hair
like lost snakes of Eden feeling their way
into Paradise, one soft truth at a time,
break the tresses where night undresses;
Bend the stem of your neck into me,
I shall wait for your hitched breath
to learn your body in unfocused eyes
and mark your skin with knowledge.

Balancing Act

Did you count how many kisses I gave,
planted like clumsy hands in wet mud,
eager to shape them before rains leave?
How many did I hold behind my lips,
inside the chest tongue calls home,
afraid to spend the night over your ear,
as if swallowing the cheer in your eye
before it reaves the soft between us,
tears everything into fluid forgetting,
before we discover the taste for blood,
and call carnivores to roam our flesh.

Waking Up At Night

I breathe in the night and fall awake
the way I fell into half-shut eyes that
demand godless oceans into becoming,
My lips play your wrists like flutes,
woodwind songs race up your spine
and spill hotly into your recesses,
All of you is waiting, blind curiosity,
My teeth mark the places you forgot
to breathe like a cave of twilight stars,
Your eyelids fold oceans to leave
their angry weight on my breath --
I am dry throat and slow industry.

Knowing Myself

I know myself in the after-noon morning,
Curtains over windows to forget light,
I woke up half a conversation ago,
My hair is a sexy mess of whirls,
My voice is all throat, no sound,
I haven't spoken a word but I talk,
Somewhere between turning in bed
and staring at a cosmological ceiling,
I know myself in the after-noon morning.

The Sound of my Breath

The sound of my breath is louder
than the silence of the walls,
I am lost between sighs that
tell me I have no control,
This is what free will looks like,
My chest heaves without gaps
between the black of my eyes
where I held all my maps,
The sweat on my nose
is the past in my rest,
where I trickle down my spine
and dwell on my best,
There is no tomorrow then
inside these forgotten deaths
but I remember my blood only
in the sound of my breaths.
The sound of my breath is louder
than the silence of the walls,
I am lost between sighs that
tell me I have no control.