in the ambit of flesh and desire

your hands caressing my throat
like it is your own,

gentle but rough,
little by little,
angling to my form and function,
fever-fervent and fastidious,

the calluses of your palm with a tight-
en-ing resolve, recovering spaces
between my hefty breaths,
the carotid pumping faster
                     for relinquishing
                     control over life-lines,

your eyes penetrating
my mind in an inebriated fullness,
the hourglass, broken,
the vagaries of time forgotten
in its absurd arbitrariness,

— i seek you, i need you, i want you —

i want the length of you against the girth
of me, the walls to be torn off, and
the electricity to wreck my anatomy — 
                                   my red lips chapped and bloodied to
                                                            your mouth’s savagery,

pick up my pieces, and claim the night
before it scatters to the winds,
and hum the dirge of this happening,
and moan as if this ache is all that is,
                                   this wound is all that we carve
                                   and draw from each other —

purple-bruised, volt-blue on a soft-brown skin
              merging into the skin of all things,
       submerging into a spell of an age-old
(lost) modus-operandi, for consumption,

                   — death, little by little,
                   living, by dying a little more,
                   and collapsing into heaps of
                   shins and skins, bones and beings,
                   and to forget that it ever existed —

      this venerable malady of sex and grandiosity,
      till loss is the only desire, the only particle
      left of me.


© Anmol Arora 2018

For my Guest Post/Prompt at dVerse to be published later today; I am entreating the poets to explore the idea and theme of desire & sexuality in poetry, especially through the perspectives of gender and sexual minorities.

Also linking it up with the Tuesday Platform at With Real Toads.

Image source (Neck / Livingston, 1988 by Robert Mapplethorpe)

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