Poems About Boning

CLIMAX, RESOLUTION

She arches,
Back, toes, neck
Sinews stretching toward the sky
With fingers buried
In sweat-slick flesh.
Her nerves are lit
With fire,
Like snake venom crashing
In heady waves
Through her veins.

He shudders,
Tremors ripple down the length of him,
Something between the onset
Of hypothermia
And the aftershock
Of an earthquake.

Then silence,
An oppressive, wordless calm
Falls between them
And by the time she opens her eyes
He is gone.

LOVE, BITTER SWEET

Hers are eyes like spellbound lovers
Lost in silk-spun dreams
Of high adventure, amorous nights,
Sweat-soaked in spent ecstasy

She dances barefoot in the rain
A halo of lightning crowns her head
Hips sway along the breeze
Her dress clings to her thighs,
Unwilling to part.
Beneath the falling leaves, I loved her
Took her in the autumn moon
With hot tongue pressed to wetted flesh
She expels a breath
Where at once my lust was slain
A great, unyielding spasm came.

She left me all the same.


TREPIDATION

I’d swallow your venom
Until an abscess formed and my jaw
Rotted away,
The bone vanishing under the spreading
Infection like
Hiroshima after the blast.

I’d eat the festering pustules
Of your wrath,
Choke them down so that my body could
Break them and absorb them,
And take the disease into my own blood.

I’d weather the storm of your
Discontent,
While it tore at my sails and stripped the
Flesh from my bones,
Poured salt-tinged water on exposed muscle,
And dismembered me a limb at a time.

I would take every beating,
Every stinging word
Flung at me in a rage,
Like knives hurled in a circus.
Until I’ve been reduced to something
Unrecognizable and heinous.

There is only so much of me to destroy,
And I fear that loving you will
Leave me in tatters, ruined for everyone that comes later.