***
Winter brings long nights and long dreams.
I preached to the wind this morning,
when rewinding my night’s sleep’s story:
the real wildness of how close we were,
the frostbites of the proximity of you,
just lying for a while in the unknown room –
two soldiers who lie in wait in a war zone.
Thinking in the dark – could be fatal,
you said: “Be afraid of unlived bullets”.
You explained how to boil the snow
to my face held in your bare hands.
Then, hand-drawn rain
splattered over my back,
and a bright-red feeling – of your bleeding fingers –
like bleeding pomegranates –
your devotion to touching me for hours,
in gunpowder we were from lips to toes –
your fire moved mountains of words
inside my head,
before I said them to you,
a sonic attack had happened,
a secret acoustic weapon had deafened the room:
I couldn’t hear my own voice,
I couldn’t reproduce Chopin’s nocturne b-moll,
but I started feeling every hue
of your fingers in precision,
every kiss as a bullet,
my eye got sharper than a sword
to penetrate into the pink fabric of your
Renaissance body…
Like salt on a wound
was the end of this night’s sleep’s story.
*Painting by San Francisco artist Elly Simmons
