If ever I could just grip your legs, white, sensitive thighs, and drag my nails down, down, down.

The welts would create the beautiful flayed on my heart. Oh and if ever I could, yet again, kiss those sauntering lips—kiss them until they bleed with the bites I would leave—dispersing them like candy on Halloween.

How many times did I ask that question?
(Trick or treat?)
While we played those
Silly,
Sexy,
Ridiculous,
Delicious
Games underneath the sheets.

And if ever you came crawling back like those bugs on my summer porch, up the screen, trying to push between my life and the outside—either you’d meet the same fate as them
(squished on the bottom of my soles)
or I’d let you in, to play with…to
stick you under that magnifying class until you
burned
with the passion that has yet to last a full year.
(Oh, I already know it wasn’t love.)

You don’t make love.
You don’t make love.

You just make sex.
With me. In my house, in my dreams, in my fears, in my tears.
You just make sex.
With an instrument. With something that you just love to play upon. You just love to set aside with that other cello, with that other piano, flute, tuba, trumpet, horn—

You just like to perfect your art.
Would God hate me to confess—
To confess I’d love to be your violin
If that isn’t yet a position filled?

I loved the way the strings you pulled were perfectly, wonderfully, provocatively unique.
Oh, religion—you hate me. My human qualities, my frail, undignified perversion as I lean on my veranda and watch the setting dawn, the sun like a reddened eye from too many hangovers—I lean against the wooden pillar wrapped in nothing but white, forgotten sheets.

The ones we laid upon those lazy summer (fall, winter, spring) nights.
The ones we blessed—
The ones you left cold, in the morning, as you prepared for work.

The ones I still wrap around my naked body, in the place of your extinct arms, your hands—spread across my stomach in interesting starfish design.
Those nails, as they dug softly into skin as lips distracted if, by accident, you tattooed
Something new upon me. And I loved it.

Every second.
(The saints spit upon me,
each time it rains—but I laugh,
laugh,
laugh,
laugh)

Because I’m a martyr, just like them;
Just happens to be my Jesus Christ isn’t the same man.

The sunsets still feel like a blinking of an eye—another day, another second. It runs like paint on a forgotten street, dripping neatly from those artists on the busy corners—they run together in colors of blind disobedience to form a staining black, that matches each of my days.

I still walk those streets, along the shores of my town, the café where I first spied you among coffee beans, winter rays, and mocha lattes—breathing cigarette smoke—never knowing you were better than nicotine.
The napkin where you wrote that horrible,
Clichéd
Poem about my eyes—as gray as seashells, yet sexy as hell. You were
Not very
Poetic.

But I still said yes. I still said fucking (yes to that too) yes to a date.
Yes to misery,
Yes to pain,
Yes to pleasure,
Yes to happiness, love, comfort,
Yes to you.

Do I regret? Do I? It’s still a question that tickles my senses, still nibbles my skin in a way that says no. That says maybe. That says yes.
That makes me feel dirty, clean, adventurous, uncertain, unsure, unclear:
perfect.

I’m like the smoky glass of a shower door.

I love, for I am human, and I lust, for I am human, and I combine them both because I am a woman. I am destined to confuse them, while men are destined to abuse them:
Abuse me—for I easily fall in cracks that others can see.
The cracks, those thin, barely visible lines that divide those two sex-inducing emotions.

Oh.

But I remember the moans, the walls I was pushed against as teeth lined my neck in necklaces that never seemed so priceless. The wrists, which always ended bruised in bracelets that felt risqué and matched every piece of clothing.

I still miss brushing your hair with my fingertips trailing like some barbaric comb
Through your dusky hair: that always set you off.
In return you’d help to brush you lips across flesh.
Those sauntering lips.

Sauntering, just as you sauntered into my life. So perfect, so confident
That you
Would get
It. Every drop you came for.

Every inch of
Skin,
Mind.
Peace of mind.

Oh yes, you took it.

Sanity!
I never want it back. It feels so much darker and colder with it. I was insane each moment I spent with you.
It was usually darker
But I never felt the cold.
(I can still find humor in the situation)
You always loved that about me.

Those last few days where you kissed me crazy,
Left me whipped and wrapped like Christmas came everyday
In satin sheets, and desires thrown like the world was ending.

Looking back, perhaps it was.

You gave me the best of you in the last week. Like you plotted the timeline of
Us.
Each minute was like an apology, if only I recognized it then.
Or perhaps some sadistic motive—building me up just to
Think:

How beautiful she will fall into the night, the morning as she wakes with space to greet her with a goodbye kiss.

I spread myself in your remaining warmth (like another of your sick jokes that decorate my home in glory, pride like some award for being a pawn).
I thought you’d come back.

Not even a note.
Not even a horrible excuse.
Like that poetry for that fucking
Date.

In the end I didn’t even have a horrible
Poem to comfort me. I had memories and memories of confusion.
Without even a clue as to why.

It hurts more—
And still.
My answer?
(feminists would never understand)

Yes.
(but we always knew.)
we always
always
fucking knew.

It would always be yes.
(I'd still like to thank you
for letting me believe I had a choice)

A secret you already knew.
You banked upon—

And if you just came back and spanked me,
Fucked me,
Kissed me,

I’d say yes again. Just to have you lean over me (naked and shy) and whisper:

“I’m back.”