Shallow, Shallow Love

By James Erwin

I lay next to you and I watch you sleep, I listen to your stomach working. I listen as a furnace within you shreds parts of another life, and binds it to your own, mending bone and muscle, I listen as your lungs filter life from the air. You shift and sigh, and I imagine the chemicals burning in your head, the electric fire dancing fiercely in your mind. You are a marvel. You are a miracle.

I want to fuck you, and feel the taut Apollonian lines of your musculature slide and tremble under my grip. I want to watch your hair sway, glistening and perfumed, as I lap at the pearls of sweat running down your spine.

I want to break your arm and hear the wet gasp of bone snapping free. I want to look into your eyes pooling with tears, wide with shock and pain, and imagine what you are thinking. Whatever would you say? I want to ache with that anticipation, sick and pale, trembling as you tremble.

I want to lean forward and pull you to my face, your eyelashes dancing on my cheek. I want to feel your eyes shifting and lunging, to see what you see and know you.

I want to saw open your skull and put my tongue into your brain, your last thoughts rushing and clinging to me inside that theater of bone and blood and magic, sparkling bitterly on my taste buds as the acid bite of your electricity fades.

I want to know you. I will never swoon as your heart pounds or shudder as chemical sparks fly down your nerves, I will never dance inside your skin. It is what I want and I will never have it. I would flay myself open and show you the terrible majesty that burns and pounds and lives within me, the alchemy of lungs and heart and brain. I would die to show you myself, even as you would open yourself to me.

I watch you sleep. I know only this surface, only the hollow languages of skin and scent and voice. I cannot name you, I cannot conjure you. It is not enough.

 You are a miracle.