my heathen and me
Our breath was counterpoint on a june sunset. He measured the distance between the frays in my hair with the coarse paws of a laborer. It was almost peaking, the auburn light on the tops of the brick silhouettes and palms. I recall thinking it was an idealistic hue, one that must have charmed the ancients, seduced the lips of the heathens, and frightened the seer's of the apocalypse. I wanted to speak of the sensations drowning in my darkest marrow, burning my nerves with a pace like that of the rodents scurrying the length of a hickory grandfather clock. I wanted these words, these secrets to be sworn, but my mouth remained agape; an oval that made the arcane starlets of film noir the pouting poster children for tobacco smoke. This man, he was Picasso, molding the tangible pieces of myself with the ease of oil paint but also with the putrid sting of turpentine. He possessed a fury I had never known, an abstract approach to love that delighted the restless soul in my breast. The absinthe enhanced the slightest movements, our hipbones locking like the rusty door of an old iron birdcage, our blood vessels straddling on the verge of violence. We melted together with the june sky, like some eduardian lock and skeleton key; my heathen and me.