I do not have a picture of you framed by my bedside so that I can gaze upon your flesh.
(It is long past my musing bedtime, and yet still I do not sleep.)
And if I did, it would not stir in me the uncomfortable passion I might later try to explain to another. No nausea from the sickness of a knotted silk scarf sliding tight-closed in my stomach. No, I may only long for it, in its decadence, from you.
Instead your ache is an annoyance. Dull. It is with a tedium your image stretches across the back of my skull, your shape now distorted to it's bony structure as if you had been born there from the get go. Sometimes when you move, your spine slips along cranial bone and I grit my teeth.
Do you understand my point yet? I look away, at anything else, but still you persist in following my inner gaze. My conscious struggles to find distractions but soon they disperse, mere watery reflections which adept, your movement destroys. Frustrating, that those forward stretched fingers act not in defiance, but rather soothe to smooth the creases formed familiar in my forehead.
Of course I refrain. I do not speak your name aloud, so you whisper in my ears from the inside out, a lilt that echo-skips from drum to bone, percussive in its path. You are at the forefront now, though I close my eyes as if it will make a difference. I see a shooting star in my vision and somehow it makes me think of you. You are both astronomical and biological in your insistence, my fragment.
Time ticks on like this. By now you have me so flustered my skin is prickling, my muscles moving tense in tides of aggravation. I look to the bottom of a glass and yet three seconds, ten minutes, two hours on, I see clear and still your distortion, sensical in what has long become senseless.
The dawn feels iminent. Back to bed, I try, once again, because I'm sure in the daylight it will be easier to ignore you, and when I dream I don't seem to care quite as much. No such luck, not surprised, but drunk and defeated I indulge, to feel dirty in the morning when I taste you on my fingertips under these nerve-bitten nails of mine.
And yes, I do dream of you darling and you are still everything I want you to be, tangible, uncertain and ultimately slipping out of my grasp with every second of growing dew-drop light. Rapid eyes move and see it is only my frame that shatters when it breaks your fall. A sensuous sensation in itself.
And when the alarm clock moans, I still do not have a picture of you framed by my bedside, and I do not want to gaze upon your flesh. My head throbs, voice croaks, and my sobbing soul complains that it wants to go home.