our own little universe

When she first comes to him his heart is empty, a desolate place, a dehydrated oasis, unsolaced, and he’s craving womanfood, without which sustenance the tension of his manhood has unwound and relaxed. He has imperative need of the kindness, sympathy, understanding, and conversation of a woman, to hear a woman’s laughter at his words, to answer her questions and be answered by her, to look into her eyes, to sniff her prineval fragrance, to hear – with slaughtered ears – the sensuous rustling of frivolous garments as legs are crossed and uncrossed beneath a table, to feel the delicate, shy weight of her hand in his – how painfully and totally aware is he of her presence, her every movement! It is as if one had been left to die beneath a bush on a lonely trail. The sun is hot and the shade of the bush, if not offering an extension on life, offers at least a slowing-down of death. And just when one feels the next breath will surely be the last, a rare & rainbow-coloured bird settles on a delicate twig of the bush and, with the magic of melodious trillings and beauty of plummage, charms the dying one back to life. The dying man feels strength flowing into and through the conduits of his body from the charged atmosphere created by the presence of the bird, and he knows intuitively in his clinging to life that if the bird remains he will regain his strength and health – and live. Seeing her image slipping away from the weak fingers of his mind as soon as she has gone, his mind fights for a token of her on which to peg memory. Jealously, he hoards the fading memory of their encounter, like a miser gloating over a folio of blue-chip stocks. The unfathomable machinery of the subconsious projects an image onto the conscious mind: her bare right arm, from curve of shoulder to fingertip. (Had his lips quivered with desire to brand that soft, cool-looking flesh with a kiss of fire, had his fingers itched to caress?) Such is the magic of a woman, the female principle of nature which she embodies and her power to resurrect and revitalize a long-isolated and loney man.

I want to see myself in your eyes
That despise me so much
I want to kiss those lips of yours
that speak evil of me
I want to hear your heartbeat
when you sigh,
and to tell you that although
you hate me,
I will always be your love.
I see the disdain in your eyes
that you reserve for me.
In your lips I find the poison
that you have to give to me.
Let me look into your eyes,
although you wound me.
Let me look at you, although I die
after loving you.