Affairs with Hallucinatory Ecstasy

The first time I fall asleep, it is just before midnight
and your cold shoulder is a comforting force
as it lulls me into a lucid dream of this narrow bed.

We are blissfully still before you lick the flesh
from the slant of my sternum and curve a smile,
open-mouthed and celebratory in discovery.
Your lips are speaking silence and we are airborne
in the momentum of lacking syllables;
sound is simple gravity in this bubble of nothing,
so without it, we are flush against my ceiling.

Cocooned by the plaster, you offer me the flesh
you stole and we paste it upon my body until
our shaking silhouettes cannot stand touch;
repetition undone by its own making.

You murmur me awake - “...stop shaking” -
and your arm across my stomach, our easy
sleeping position, induces fierce nausea.
My overheated body, burnt from within,
causes you to withdraw and the battle lines
have been drawn. Pressed against each other,
suspended over cheap blue cotton bedsheets,
I take charcoal to your skin, sharp quick lines
against your hard planes make me aware:
the keen edges of your dimples cut my chest,
so you can claim my lungs as your own.

We are in bed and you are breathing two sets of lungs
alive. Flat on my back and staring at the flesh marks
you left on my ceiling, my nerve endings tell me this
is perfectly real and you are telling me you can save this,
but I know dead flesh when I see it
and this, this is...

sunstrokes in the window
and you are worried; sweat sticking to my neck, clammy hands.
My pouty thermometer reads your mind: I am forty degrees
and falling but for now, you kiss my brow and smile.
I clutch at your chill...

before startling awake again.
It is just past midnight and minutes stretch out in hunger
like my mind as it encircles yours in search of solace.

a/n: I can't get the formatting to work right. Even with HTML but the lines that begin "sunstrokes" and "before startling" are meant to be tabbed in so that they fall beneath the ellipses.