You Were On Top of Us Freely

You were on top of us freely, that is all I remember, and we were starry with enjoyment. You turned to the beautiful youth because we were light, because we were so full of life that our skin alone could not seem to contain us. We were burning on all sides for the world. Shade, shadow — nothing. Nothing the moon. You lifted the cloth and peered under. “She is beautiful,” you said. “Oh! She is pretty.” I was speechless and faint. I could barely breathe.

And it came out in your song. Our fertile voices carried across water, so that our would-be lovers struggled to get near us, our opened lives pouring out upon the sea, spilling out of our own foolish hands, faintly crying.

I didn't know how to find that gold-capped ocean, after you had gone. How was I supposed to know where it was? I only knew you did not want or expect me to follow you there, where the orifice to everything withered, including my heart. I knew what gaudy flowers existed out there on the coast of that sea, whose waves were lit up and rose-tipped in the evening like my nipples.

Human relations, the love of French lace, appeared darkly there, and I assumed you were never coming back to me. It is unknown whether I was just the cheap idol of possession that I once seemed to be. I guess that was always up to me. But with what rough, obscene, and broken mouths the actors of life have spoken.

So, share your song under wild silk with me. If those of us under the new wind were unable to lure you from your ship to the barren riverbeds where we would breed. Share your song in this forgetting air, the times, the seasons that brought you ashore, when you came home from the nipples of your Trojan Whores like Ulysses, and lay down like the wind's brother, like a god of love before a girl of song. In truth you were the only light to me, the only light for my eyes. So, now, share your song with the round and oval, red mouths of heaven.