Red candles rage like volcanoes...... The doors that opened to problems— drafts, anxieties— slam shut........ Rose petals from our hands— scarlet boats in a sea of merchant ships........ And we— swimming, in our twilight thick with fragrance, bathing in white spaces— vast, whispering in a chorus of whispers and along the breath-lines that have become processions........ The sea will not divide fairly— anchor chain tangled with anchor chain ships knotted there, inextricable........ The body burns violently but does not melt—that is all........ I scorn the plots of fairy tales, yet: you are a soldier in love with beauty, I am your ballerina from the palace........ and I am drawn by love's wind toward the burning. It sounds as though we flow in molten tin water, circling through the flicker........ Night pours a ringing bell from us........ Scarlet boats sink into darkness........ Candles age........ the flame wavers, waves sway, hearing a hunger for 'more'— each sleep more and more terrifies........ Hair like wet reeds beaten against the face, but gently........ snake beneath your fingers........ Look—toward the ceiling, like a copper dome (reflections give it such warmth)........ You kiss me through this veil of water harder and longer, until dawn........
# The Sea of Senses We are drowning in the infinite— each nerve a captain of a ship lost in waters that have no shore. My hands know the language of salt, my eyes the grammar of foam. When you touch me, it is like a sailor finding land after years, the shock of solid ground beneath palms that have forgotten what stillness means. Your voice arrives like a lighthouse beam cutting through my darkness, and I am both found and more lost than before, because now I know what I am searching for. The skin is a map with no borders, every freckle a continent where desire builds its cities, where longing speaks in a thousand dialects. We are not making love— we are making language, syllable by syllable, learning grammar from the friction of breath, punctuation from the spaces between heartbeats. The body is a sea, and we are swimmers who have forgotten that we were ever meant to reach the other shore. We are content to drown, to taste salt and sky, to let the current decide our direction. In the dark, your hands become my compass. Your mouth, my map. And I surrender to the vast, wet geography that has no name, that needs no name, because it speaks only in the dialect of touch, only in the language that begins when words finally end.
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