Imagination

I like to imagine I'm the man of your dreams. All wit and charm, quick with a joke that lights up your face and brings laughter bubbling out of your throat. Just as quick to urge my name from your lips with a look, a sharp gleam in the eyes that sends shockwaves through you from where my fingrnails touch your skin until every nerve is either a raging torrent or a searing inferno, until your need to feel more of me is all you can fathom.

I like to imagine you find me adorable, despite sometimes deplorable thoughts. Vulgar jokes and crude remarks aside. We all wanted to be coveted, regardless of our faults and flaws, in light of our virtues. Perhaps my constant references to Whitman will entice you, or the way I re-tell Shakespeare when I'm entertaining a crowd. Maybe the sly, subtle, occasionally obtuse references to absurd pop-culture or Dungeons and Dragons will be more appealing. Maybe its the half-bastard accent I take on when I've had enough to drink, swirling between just-Irish-enough-to-be-punched-in-the-face-by-an-Irishman and something I've made up on the fly.

I like to imagine you want me. Desperately, at times, the way I surely want you. For all my willingness to be obeissant, I have never liked to be more attached to you than you will ever be to me. I imagine its my words, my one real gods-given gift, that most attract you. For anyone that couldn't find some interest in them will undoubtedly find the rest of me drab, boring, and needlessly conceited.

I like to imagine taking you and being taken, the sex fraught with conflict, roiling and heady like great waves pummeling a cliffside, battering at the land as if it could reclaim what man has taken from the sea. I will be hard, commanding, and you'll leave me with cuts and bruises, tender wounds to remember you by while I'm away. You'll scratch and bites and tear my flesh. I'll make you feel like the first, the last, the only. The Alpha and Omega of making me cum.

And you are, in that breathless span of seconds, hours, days. That aching convulsion of limbs so remniscient of the whirling chaos that was the universe before the gods set it in order.

Too soon you'll wake from your dreams, and I'll become irrelevant.

But you'll return here, and we'll dance together. Slowly, spinning in circles on the sidewalk while cars pass and the streetlight overhead hums its constant tune. You'll flit away, on the trail of fleeting night, and I'll give chase. I've lived this hunt a thousand times, more. I've lived it in the secret places I keep hidden from outside. In the forest surrounding the cabin where I keep all my heart's collections, all my collected hearts. In the moonlit glade, near the fountain where the hunt always ends. On the cracked and broken road that leads off the edge of this world, through the utter darkness beyond, into the starry canopy still further, and then to another edge where nothing passes.

I've lived this hunt, lived for it, and never lived at all.

I have never chased you, never found you and caught you, never fallen for your laughter or fallen, laughing, into your arms. There is no green pasture, no seaside cliff where the smell of salt and life hangs heavy in the air. There is no willow staring off into a forest, contemplating like Macbeth watching Dunsinane. Or Aragorn peeering into Fangorn Forest.

I am, after all, only imagining.

I am, after all, only the man in your dreams.

Sleepily Yours,
-S.R.