Transparent Words - Poetry

She was hands & claws groping, harsh in the neon back room where nobody goes: her flesh sweating sugared wine and cheap perfume. Tell me what you want she said, tell me what you want, but I was too drunk to articulate the raging of all my dreams.

The sourness of age trembled in the tracery of lines on her face. I listened hard to her breathing. I listened hard to the movement of her tongue: every orifice, every pore, an ear.

But I couldn’t hear her story.

We coupled: lost ourselves in folds of caustic flesh; strained violently towards unthinking oblivion, the blackness of orgasm, the wet mess of bio-chemistry.

She came to me like a sacrificial lamb: her powdered, scented flesh, an offering. She steered me through blurred corridors and took my fingers in her mouth, promising sweetness I had never understood: her eyes full of all the sorrows of the world.

I wanted to give her a fix of joy: to bathe her in the cold sharp exhilaration of life: to fill her with more than just moist emptiness.

I wanted to untangle the barbs,

To loose the briars,

She was a Christ, a Mary, a Magdalene: the blood of saints stirring inside her skin. She was a sacrament: a Goddess who extinguished herself for love; and she was mocked for all her giving.