Counting Down

I've put your words on a stick, so I can cook your thoughts over the burning of my need as it flickers like a serpent tongue licking air.

Drinking in the light bouncing off your face, I brace my throat for the tickle, and I wonder how bitter my gut will burn at the embrace.

You slide down smooth, like childhood memories as they're made; nothing can prepare me for the reaction of the beast in me as it consumes you.

You feel like lust set in stone along the edges of my sanity, framing fences to keep logic in the structure of desire stretching true.

My fingers itch at at the tip as though not having you is an infection I can't treat with the remedies in my mind.

Breath gives out at the graze, overriding my instincts as I descend into the riddle of pain and healing as they battle will.

Nothing can prepare a man for his undoing, when he chooses to ignore the cause of virtue decaying into promises made unaware.

All my statements float on wind currents circling the edges of your ear, and you don't know where I've been before.

Inside the exchange of you and me, neither of us know how deep the trail leads, but we must walk.

Our feet tread on mistakes acting as tripwires laid by malicious hands, always seeking blood to water the pores.

I'll save you from it; you may not see, but I promise you will feel me trying.

I promise you will feel the heat, dripping hot from future scars before they scab and shrink.

They are fresh, newly acquired lacerations, you press your hand to slow the spread of sacrifice.

It might get harder to ignore the signs that speak of tragedy waiting in ambush.

We can face them together, somehow joined tighter than either of us had originally planned.

Our vision, limp from exhaustion, can't see clearly to navigate through the thorns.

We will both look like nightmares by the time this is over.

You say that you prefer it this way enough to try.

I reach for meaning in the air of your tongue.

You can taste my blood when I find it.

It tastes like tomorrow arriving before it should.

Let's just not answer; forget the knocks.

They ring ugly through the door.

We refuse to answer it.

We say a prayer.

You say goodbye.

I burn.

Farewell.