I been lying in the dark since the sun went down,
a raw electric current and a low and heavy sound
in the back of my skull where her image sits and grinds,
the curvature of everything I’m losing half my mind —
the way she bent to get her shoes, the fabric pulling tight,
a hundred thousand megawatts of accidental light
across the kind of body that was built for being held,
and I’m lying here with nothing but the fever and the hell.
She’s across the city sleeping and she doesn’t even know
that her absence is a furnace with the bellows set to blow,
that I’m gripping at the mattress like a man grips at a rope
when the drop beneath is nothing but libidinous and dope —
sick with it, thick with it, stupid from the heat,
the remembered press of belly and the interlock of feet,
the salt-slick of her collarbones, the catch beneath her breath,
and I’m lying here rehearsing her like some voluptuous death.
If she knocked right now I’d answer in a single-second flat,
I’d have her back against the wall before the door swung back,
my hands in all the places that I’ve catalogued for hours,
this rapacious three a.m. machine that thinking overpowers.
The ceiling’s just a screen now, playing reruns of her walk,
the swing and sway, the effortless, the way she doesn’t talk
but says it all in motion — hip and shoulder, wrist and thigh —
and I’m wrung out, strung out, wide awake, and I am burning dry.