If I could, I’d go back in time and change the lifespan of the dinosaurs
by fifty million years just to figure out how to handle your flesh better.
I once saw a bee take one look at your bare shoulders and fly away;
even it couldn’t bring itself to sting your white skin.
Language always fails us. We carry our pitchers of vowels like Braille,
only to find that we are unable to read by touch in the end:
two years ago I tried to find a poetic way to ask you to sleep with me,
but I ended up begging you to fuck me instead.
Tonight the sky is pink ash, the moths are burning themselves
to death against the streetlamps, and a suburban housewife
is committing suicide like Sylvia Plath by sticking her head in an oven
that the roast just came out of. I was not a package labeled
“Handle with care;” I was a goddamn time bomb ticking down
the seconds until you touched me again.
Now, Rome is burning as our mouths sing like violins,
now, your hand is on my thigh and every new tap of your fingers
is a wound opening, where’s the antiseptic, somebody get
the bandages and gauze, we’ll need that too.
Like Hansel and Gretel, I shed a piece of my own skin every time
you stepped through my door, leaving clues, trails of my existence,
like those radioactive tracers that scientists inject into cells
so they can find their way back to one another again.