Under the maple,
I am embittered.
My resentment pours out in an amber hue,
viscous like resin,
my nimble fingers tacky against the bark that will one day become money-like
to form bills,
bills,
bills.
Upon receiving,
we may feel fulfilled,
but its never suffice,
to sink your spite,
because just as soon as the maple loses its leaves
and the sap runs dry
and the funds disappear,
all we have
again
is the bitterness.
do you so dare
to suck on contempt like a sour cherry,
the tannins taut on your teeth,
saliva building in your gums,
pulling out every last ounce of bitterness?
do you so dare
to strangle grief with your bare hands,
to wring dry your nerves,
to feel flesh bulge between your digits,
releasing the life from it?
do you so dare
to watch joy spark and crackle in front of your eyes,
to let it ignite your irises,
to let the purest form of energy bounce off your sockets like mirrors,
to let it penetrate the windows to your soul?
do you so dare
to let emotions travel through your bones,
to ooze through your skin,
to feel fully?
I would break through veins and veils to have your fingertips on mine,
on me.
I know every ridge and curlicue,
where your nail beds meet their tips,
and where my skin has reached up to receive them.
If not for skin, pleasure would weep and trail so effusively out of me.
Every cell and fibre knows no more than response.
A touch so titillating,
you revert me to an ancient form.
Autonomic reception,
an existence purely tactile,
for the graze and grope of your hands.
I am blessed to be so complex,
as to understand in both mind and body,
what it means to have your fingertips on mine,
on me.
I bite in,
raw, with fervour,
it dribbles off my lips and through my fingers.
I am unquenchable, insatiable,
panting,
my hunger, thirst, ripe as a summer’s peach,
but it’s a summer’s love that begs to me,
sticky on my skin,
nestled in my neck.
I want a love pure as a newborn
and sinful as the dead.
My teeth on yours,
unable to quell desire.
With your peach heart
in my peach hands,
I take a bite.
Tamed I may be, by a summer’s love.
I could cry days for you,
weeks,
years.
I could cry you a new calendar,
a new generation,
a new slice of time in the sky,
salty enough,
to compensate your sweetness,
a place where’d you’d be the revered sovereignty,
and would ban my tears for eternity,
because you never cease to exist for me,
as long as I can cry for you.
You watch lovers hold hands,
but you do not see the subtle thumb caress,
the electricity between their shoulders,
the stolen glances of knowing among two.
You listen to someone speak of their person,
seemingly over-the-top professions of love,
but you do not hear the song in their head when this person is around,
the bells and harmonies,
the ringing and pulsating,
the energy of the other
in the air.
To view love as an outsider,
is like asking a poet to write with no muse,
like asking someone to experience joy for you.
To be in love,
is to be fulfilled from the scraps of mortality,
for the everyday to become highly personal,
to move through life,
through love.
Solitude is comfort.
Sitting inside my heart, knowing it is just me to look out for,
has a level of safety, of solace,
of relief.
I know my requirements and tend to them endlessly.
But now there’s you.
you.
You have a space carved out inside my heart,
with flashes of your strong hands and soft eyes,
every squeal of joy,
the tightness in my cheeks,
our supple hearts fleshed as one.
But it’s not just me anymore.
Many years of solitude have made rusted the spaces in my heart meant for another.
I am habitually engulfed in a sense of seclusion.
And for a moment I believe again that it is just me,
as it always has been.
And then you press against my hearts’ walls,
your presence juiced into my veins,
coating every corner,
and I remember you are here.
you.
In all your gentle glory,
inside my head and by my side and in my heart,
enveloping me.
It isn’t just me anymore.
And what an honour it is that it’s you.
You.
The idea
of men,
of manhood,
the way it tasted in my mouth,
gagging
on my pitiful fortuned future,
one where a man
with a hairy chest and no room in it for me,
was what to desire,
so I learned to choke back my own,
believing a life without love,
a throat full of thirst,
was my white flag.
So don’t tell me you always knew,
because for a long time I didn’t.
I held in my mouth the dripping inkling
that i was meant for a woman all along.
But the delectable nectar,
the joyous certainty,
was far too sweet to spit out.
Your presence creates an hourglass of goodbyes,
where our first embrace turns it over,
and every second, every grain afterwards,
brings us closer to the end.
My love is shelf stable.
My heart is best before sealed,
for an infinite future.
The apparent stagnation
is really the exaltation of immortality,
the way a feeling can remain at its prime until necessary,
the bounty firm against the cheek,
waiting.
Waiting for an undetermined moment where the seal breaks,
where the sand begins to bead down the glass,
where you are no longer inexahasutible,
and must succumb to the laws of nature,
to let bacteria consume you and your love
in slow increments.
My love, although seemingly infinite before breakage, becomes volatile once breached.
Who will break the seal and render me perishable?
Lashanda Forsberg 