exhaustion,
You look beautiful tonight.
Candlelight is so forgiving.
Pecking at your food becomes you. It serves the haunted hollows of your eyes, your cheeks … thinly veiled. Tiny veins peeking through, hungry for love.
I love holding your hand. Its fragility reminds me
Reminds me of the weeks and weaks, months and moths
of your labour
of your throbbing patience. Those tiny veins alarmed in response.
Years
of lifting your delicate neck to the noose, swinging just out of reach.
Will you lay with me? Let me fold your tender and hesitant body into mine. I’ll stroke your back. I’m fascinated by the chords. I can hear them echoing your grief. The refrain shredded, now, with repetition.
Your spine ripples beneath my fingertips, an accordion’s wheeze. And your hips shine with their bruising. A nightfall of cover on your pale luminescence.
Here, rest your dry brow on my breast. It’s soft. Pliable. Alive to the fractured cliffs of your face. Burrow there. Let my broken heart leak into your whispered staccato. We can fuse there. Maybe my discordant beat will harmonize with the silent clutch of your lungs as they labour for breath. We can create a tango of sorts, my masculine imperative a thrust to your feminine decline.
You are scented with the talcum of dust. Flecked in the moonlight filtering through the blinds. I could reach out my hand and watch it settle on my skin. Capture it with my eyelash. Brew it with my tears. Paint its delicate paste over my lips, leaving the imprint of my sorrow on your cheek as I kiss you good night.
We will dream together.
Your splintered embrace an elixir.
My strength, your warrior.
And when we rise, the morning gently commanding our sore feet to floorboard, we will walk hand in hand to the cold table where we will nourish, once more, the hope of our salvation.