myth of the whole being greater than the sum of its parts

this body is a plastic bottle dense with daisies, arms packed with the unplucked, unanswering, open your eyes. the hip is a machine like any other. we acrobatic, adolescent, unhinge our jaws like bottle tops, your arms a zoo of cables, the forearms, their clutch, each ligament bundled electric, my back a knot of snakes arching their diamond mouths, held. in this, the body moves before the brain, skins racing out before us unleashed, all id, this tongue is not habitual not all known though every night, every night meeting, what could we confess tonight on this familiar bed with our sure mouths rapacious, rapturous, a lick for each repeated secret, the eyelid’s canopy a forest we enter nightly willingly lost, losing, a grapple of fingers and we halfway dreaming enter as if hunting a thing known only by myth, loving the thing the way camouflaged men love the huge elusive grizzly, the ancient uncatchable fish, all the history in a drawn bow, rifle, in a harpoon, make no mistake, Ahab loves the whale, it’s his own back he sees rising from the water, each sinew of your hands has a name, it is my name, it is the scrawl of the daughter we don’t make, it is the word hunger in the erasable language of chalk, we erase it, we hold on.

~

we are an avalanche of sweat, halves unpeeling, your chest rising the scent of something cooked, new bread after all this kneading, our hands dissolving into tendon, small bone, nail, we raid the sheets for pieces, I want your thumb for my back pocket, to roll across my desk while writing, to hold in my mouth like a lost child in a department store, trying to be brave.

~

in the morning you are a cave’s mouth, an invitation to curl senseless and sticky with the night’s exhalations, to paint the windows night, unplug the clock and ignore the song of the ice cream truck already trolling, the landlord’s baby’s stacatto wail, old men yelling in Spanish while they feed the pigeons, the ragged pigeon at the window looking in on us, the accusing day, the nagging light, if I enter through the navel you might not even wake, spend the whole day with your face, directional, unibodied, I pass through and out the other side of you in time to unlock the door, lay down on the couch, kiss you and say in the dream just now I was all daisies, you all machine, we were cast out for fear of what, together, we might make.