Blur

Trust is a line on your eyelids,
it's a cracked smile.

Trust blends the edges of our shapes
and clings stubbornly to the ends of our fingertips.
Whispering consent is a power
that touching would rather demand.

This is the body in secret.

This is a body that won't tell a lie.

All of the honesty written in
fine, uneven lines over soft peach skin.
A ledger displaying debts without guilt.
"To whom do you owe the most?"

I am doing my best impression of myself.
I am doing my best impression of a person in control.
_

You have said everything I need to know.
A proclamation for the emboldened, 
the brazen lads.
That, or a cry for help.
_

It's possible, yes,
for your body to become your home.
To feel safe.

To feel something at all.

When the sweat collects on your brows
and tension tightens each muscle taut.
Teeth clenched, legs stretched.
My own Prometheus.
_
 
This is the past calling in a favour,
fetishizing love that can't be unmade.

Tangled hair gives way to hips that strain and stretch,
threatening to split their weary restrains.
It's a bruise that echoes on each subsequent touch, 
long after the colour's faded.

A manifesto for every cell,
defining each goosebump,
tracing the contours of my mind
until every fold contains a place to hide.

This is a brain undercover, with the flesh complicit. 

This is a brain searching aimlessly for reprieve. 
-

The hallmark of an effective imaginary
is the absence of that which made things real.

Skin, so easily, can be ripped and repaired.
Subtle reconstructions of a scene that
playback like a record;
the testimony of a vigilant witness
ushered quickly from the courts.

To try to cultivate the space between us,
to make it rich with love that would spare the void,
was to run a fool's errand on beggar's time.
Easier to let gravity do the work than to 
exist only in the violence of inertia - 
that which is going nowhere
and not bracing for impacts.
-

The ghosts in dead bedrooms
are haunted only by the demons in the living.