Foxes.

Yesterday, I dreamt that you met my mother. You offered her one of your cigarettes. The yellow stain of habit near the tips of your fingers, creases in your corners. Mostly, he is sand. I opened some floodgates, sifted my fingers through the ash to find… what? Pointed. It slipped out of my grasp.

Fox-sly. For all your cleverness, you have no subtlety (ripe though he may have been [for the harvest]). You are two purple eye sockets, more an idea of a person, a shadow of a man. All dreams and no bones, or all bones and no meat. (Shoddy craftsmanship. Baby teeth. ) Pungent smoke smog smell, the thick reek, the smoldering cloud that hangs overhead whenever you are near. Heady and biting. It was biting. Pointed incisors, gleaming teeth in white lines. Curved like a wolf. Lip in a constant sneer/scowl. Swarthy.

[[ BUT -- I salivate at the memory of his profile. Sharp angles, a pair of languid eyes. His cracked knuckles and haphazard freckles huddled together on each shoulder. And the way he approached, magnetic. A captivating (compelling) stance. Trance. His hangdog look (the longing emblazoned in my mind) : brows pushed up in the center, mouth slightly open. A beggar. Starving/Something he would die without.

Sometimes, the moon purrs whispered words at you, delivers dreams that were born somewhere else/somewhere other than the back alleys of the mind. She reached her arms out to him drunkenly, heavily. Wound themselves together. Lofty. (With no prior incentive) She lifted her shirt daringly/improvised the moves. [Sometimes, when I look at you for too long/too closely, I (feel as if I) can see your blood cells mingle. Each tiny coil that retracts – the space between each strand of hair. Penny dreams coated in a fine layer of sweat, beading and pooling in pockets of flesh. Your pores contract. Lavish.]

“THIS,” he said. “THESE.” Curl of a cat paw. Slid his hands down over her hips, the way a sliver slides in/beneath the skin, the sigh of a wound expanding. Fleshed out in the thought/the touch > flesh made thought. The swell of his ribs against mine.

The sky was sallow-skinned and lit with anticipation, with the prickle of a week-old shave. Tip of a pointed tongue, the flush, the embrace. Piercing star gaze. A puncture wound. A tangle of fingertips. Hands gripping flesh, sinking in teeth, dropping through the mattress, through the floorboards, through the foundation of the earth. The moon wiped the condensation off her brow and called out, “Break him down, girl.” ]]

These missiles, projecting themselves into my thoughts/my arms. You are a soul-and-belly-ache/aching heartache. A nagging affliction that makes the ridges on the roof of my mouth ripple with discontent. I find you more volcanic/volatile than ever. Each protruding hip joint was a bullet. Temptation winding my hair around his fingers, giving me a sharp tug backwards. He leaves red imprints on your jaw and shakes you up and leaves your chest cavity resonating/ringing with the force of a blow. Supersensory (& wildly out of place.) “Honey,” said my Dream-Mother, “Sometimes you just have to take your vices and run with them.” (in a Southern accent, something my mother would never say). The cigarette he offered her dangled between her fingers as if it had been there always. “And you shouldn’t trust any thing that never lost/keeps/kept its baby teeth. The better to scam us with.”

I woke up on the wrong side of the bed that morning and decided: I can’t help you find inner peace. You were the worst dream I ever had.