Desire

My desires are impossible to decipher. It presents an image, an almost comical image, an expression, imprint of the ways in which love lives in things.

A gush of faucet water throws up 

the thrill you send through me 

in your awaited absence. 

It is ridiculous that I cannot produce 

my desire for you as coalescence 

that can proclaim 

language, art, history, and every justice in the world.

Yet I find myself

gently rising,

like eyes touching the summit, to the conclusion— 

I need you as reminder.

I don’t need to imagine sweet childhood loneliness to describe love anymore. 

Instead, I must find ways to retain you on my skin,

because love is lost in the seines that cover me. 

Never can I shake the habits that leave indeterminate 

all the ways I will embrace you. 

I know your sharp eyes have already made note,

the ways in which I fail, 

in which I paint the tapestry of desire, 

with nothing but euphemism. 

I will not repeat but I am toppled 

by the ways you shift, a flame of notion, an immortal firefly in my vision.

But if you must know, you will decipher nothing of my desire. 

It is how you realize maybe, 

irrationalities make their place around you

like a snore— consistent but gentle in their expansion. 

You will finally know how my hair coils

when you look at your feet and see my eyes, 

the object of your desire.