Seventeen when I met. Looked. The second time.

Invaders

1.

She climbs in
while we are making
love. Pinpricks
of desire fatten and balloon
into anger, aimless,
bleeding from her pores like heat.

She wants to push
his hands away and crawl
under the mattress,
press her cheek against
the tiles and feel the weight
of God on her back.

She bitters at the tricks
in the man’s bright teeth,
his bow-tie mouth, the euphony
that can pour out.

2.

I am stronger than you, and better
at holding the edges of events together.
I order gestures and ripples of skin into sentences

while you are waiting for the clang and brattle of love
or danger. I cannot stomach the confusion of your body,
how your skin mistakes a sweat-cold wisp of his hair

for a spider scaling the slope of your cheekbone, or how your mouth
won’t open, though I fill it, fill it to bursting-- you are my
cornucopia that holds abundance back. I am your abundance.

And how I hate the cool stranger
who claps her hands over my eyes,
who unfurls her arms and blooms
a wall of light, barring me from you,
unraveling me from your senses,
leaving me curled,

a dark, hard pocket of her light, when I would bid you
take me with you everywhere.

-- lessmess