I have memorized the longitude of every curve she owns,
and the latitude of freckles scattered brown across her bones,
and at three a.m. the atlas opens up behind my eyes
and I’m tracing routes through territory measured thigh by thigh.
The visceral won’t quiet down, the animal won’t sleep,
it paces in the ribcage making promises to keep
about the things I’d do if she were standing at the door —
the wall, the floor, the countertop, the bed, and then the floor.
Her perfume’s in the cotton still, a fading provocation,
and I’m inhaling deep like it’s some sacral invocation
of the body pressed against me two-point-five eternities ago,
the wet heat of her whisper and the rhythmic undertow.
I kicked the blankets off at one. By two I’d given in
to the full concupiscent reel projected on my skin —
her teeth against my earlobe and the hand that traveled south,
the devastating competence of her slow and knowing mouth.
She’s sleeping in her own damn bed without a single care
while I am navigating fever, sheets, and sweat-damp hair,
the insatiable cartography of every inch I’ve kissed,
a voluptuous and endless epidemiological tryst.
This isn’t lonesome. This isn’t sad. This is the blood turned loud,
the cock turned tyrant, brain turned off, the wanting like a shroud
wrapped tight around a man who’s spent three hours in the grip
of the most libidinous, rapacious, febrile, sweat-soaked trip
through every frame of every moment she has ever moved —
the walk, the bend, the stretch, the turn — and nothing is improved
by darkness, distance, pillows, fans, or any clock that ticks,
the visceral just drives and drives without a goddamn fix.