Your Body is a Wonderland.

I am leaning on the sofa, she is sitting on the floor, the small table between us. It seems to be absolution simply to listen to her. But I know that if she touches me my shame will be exposed, she'll see in my eyes the terrible things that have marked me/.

A last shudder of strangeness, last flash of fear before longing pushes its blade into me, up to the hilt. Skinned alive, my hand reaches for her hesitantly....

Now impossibly she is placing her cheek - soft - sun warmed peach - against my cold palm.

I begin to trace every line, her lengths, and shapes, and realize suddenly that she's perfectly still, her hands clenched and I'm appalled by my stupidity, my longing humilates her. Then I realize that she is totally concentrated, pinioned under my tongue, that she's giving me the most extragavant permisson to roam the surface of her. Only after I explore her this way, so slowly, an animal outlining territory, does she burst into touch.

I'm paralayzed in the cave her hair makes. Then my hands move to feel her slim waist and suddenly I know how she would bend after a shower, twisting her hair into a wet turban, feel the shape of her back would make, leaning over. I like an oar balanced in its arc above the water, dripping silver. I hear her voice but not her words, so soft, the noise of her whole body is in my ears.

I am deafened by the buzzing drone of her body, the power lines of blood, blue threads under her skin. Cables of tendons; the forests of bone in her wreist and feet. Each time she stops speaking, in each long pause, I renew the pressure of my grasp. I feel her slowly going heavy. How beautiful the blood's pull towards trust, the warm weight of the sleeper entering her orbit, pulling towards me, fragrant, heavy and still as apples in a bowl and oh ! so beautiful the serene calmness of her look as she meanders in the gardens of sleep.

It's not the stillness of something broken but of absolute rest......


When I drift off to sleep I dream of her - young, glistening smooth as marble, sugary wet with sunlight. I feel the sun melting over my skin.

I wake as if I've been dug out of the dream and lifted into the world, a floating exhaustion. My muscles ache from stretching into her, as I lie in sunlight across the bed.

Every cell in my body has been replaced, suffused with peace........