I.
It starts as a whisper
not in my ear but under my ribs,
a pulse like a black-winged bird
beating against bone,
a hunger with no tongue yet
that still moans your name.
Your scent lives in my skin
long after you’ve left.
Even the sheets smell like your hair,
like sweat and smoke and sin.
My hands keep moving when I’m alone,
searching for the shape of you
like a thief in a dark room.
II.
Obsession is a fever,
a cathedral of wet mouths,
stone arches built of ache.
I kneel at the altar of your body
and my prayers come out dirty,
all teeth, all spit,
all promises of ruin.
Your eyes are a command
and my body obeys.
I want to drag my tongue
over every inch of your shadow,
mark you with my breath
until the walls remember the sound.
III.
This is not love.
Love has air.
This is chokehold desire,
hand at the back of the neck,
thumb pressing at the pulse.
You look at me and it’s a blade,
and I want it to cut deeper.
I want to taste the sweat
behind your knees,
to press my hunger
into the curve of your spine,
to make you arch, tremble,
beg the way my blood begs me.
IV.
You’re the religion I wasn’t looking for.
Kneeling, kneading, needing,
I become less man, more animal,
skin to skin,
tongue writing the gospel
on the soft of your thighs.
Every whisper is a sin,
every moan a confession.
The room is wet with it:
our breath, our hunger,
the ghosts of every word
we never say in daylight.
My fingers leave bruises
like verses of a psalm
nobody dares to read aloud.
V.
I dream of tying you to language,
wrapping you in syllables,
each knot a vowel,
each stroke a consonant.
My voice is the rope.
Your body is the page.
My hunger writes and writes
until the ink runs out
and still I keep pressing the pen.
VI.
Obsession is a storm.
I am its wind,
you are its center,
and we break everything
that tries to stand between us.
In the dark,
my hands are wolves.
In the dark,
your moans are the only map I follow.
VII.
I want to be inside your breath,
inside your pulse,
inside the part of you
that still resists.
I want to find it
and ruin it gently,
make it mine,
make it ours,
make it something
that can’t exist without the other.
VIII.
And when the sun comes up
and the fever breaks,
my mouth still tastes of you,
my skin still hums,
my bones still whisper your name.
I don’t want cure.
I don’t want clarity.
I want the sickness,
the sweat,
the trembling,
the way we pull at each other
like drowning things
pulling for air.
IX.
Even now,
writing this,
I’m hard with it,
wet with it,
lost in it.
Your ghost sits on my tongue
like a curse,
like a blessing.
I chew it,
swallow it,
let it mark me from the inside out.
X.
Call it what you will, lust, obsession, hunger.
I call it a country.
I call it a war.
I call it you.
XI.
I stalk your shadow through the hours.
It clings to my teeth,
the taste of you like iron and honey,
the ache like a bruise
I press just to feel it throb.
Every text, every look,
a match dragged over my ribs.
My skin is tinder;
you are the spark.
I’m on my knees again,
not to worship but to consume.
To take.
To leave marks.
You gasp when I come close,
a sound like paper tearing,
like surrender folded in half.
XII.
Your voice becomes a leash.
It pulls me forward,
pulls me under.
Each whisper of sir
is a collar.
Each breath of please
is a lock clicking shut.
You wear submission like silk,
and I wear it on my hands
like scent, like oil.
I tell you to kneel
and you do.
I tell you to open
and you bloom.
I tell you to beg
and you pour yourself out
like wine on the floor.
XIII.
There is filth in this devotion.
A good filth.
The kind that drips down thighs,
that coats fingers,
that makes you tremble and shake.
We build a cathedral of sweat
and kneel in it,
two heretics in the gospel of want.
I drag my hunger over you
like a blade,
like a tongue.
You shudder.
You whisper good girl back to me,
and it’s a spark in dry grass.
We burn.
We keep burning.
XIV.
I want to lock you in my voice,
tie you to a command,
pull you closer until you stop being
a body
and start being a pulse
under my palm.
The language of us
is a low growl,
is a bitten-back moan,
is a yes that lives in the throat
long before it’s spoken.
XV.
In another life
I would be gentle.
In this one
I am the rope and the fire.
I am the sweat in your hair,
the spit on your lips,
the breath you lose
when I press my palm to your throat.
You arch, you tremble,
you push back into my hands,
a perfect contradiction —
wanting the hold
and the hurt,
wanting the ruin
and the rescue.
XVI.
And still the obsession grows,
a vine creeping over my ribs,
a dark flower blooming in my mouth.
It tastes like your name.
It tastes like midnight.
It tastes like
don’t stop.
I drag my nails down your back.
You gasp.
I tell you to stay still.
You shake.
I tell you to beg again.
You sob,
but you do it.
XVII.
We are not clean.
We are not safe.
We are a fever that refuses to break.
Every night I think of you,
my hand a poor substitute,
my breath a ghost.
Every night you text me,
a single word,
and it undoes me:
wet
please
more.
And every night
I answer,
my words a command,
a curse,
a promise:
kneel
open
mine.
XVIII.
When it ends,
if it ends,
we will walk away
covered in fingerprints and echoes.
But for now
we are here,
in this dark country
of want and ruin,
where obsession is the only law
and our bodies are the scripture
we keep rewriting
with every breath.
