You want me to tell you everything,
I won't speak of some memories,
it should be more than enough
that I sensed another world in you,
accents of another atmosphere.

If you think I'm only predatory
or merely a misguided romantic,
you don't know the first thing about me.

You won't see the heavy petals
or the ache when my heart
splits like butterfly wings,
you only knew the shape
of every monster to come.

You were once draped around me,
roamed my chest with fingertips
far more gentle than mine,
whispered sweet nothings I absorbed
just as your skin took me in,
a mark felt but never seen,
invisible signatures upon your quarry.

Your face pressed to my chest,
floating in a dark stream
somewhere behind eyelids,
somehow, I've already told you
everything in the way I've grown still.

The words simply couldn't form yet.

How flesh became the brilliance
of light discovered in the ether,
how I dreamed in every element
and shape you could possibly imagine.

Holding you as we stood on windswept cliffs,
the ocean speaking its ancient language in waves,
your valleys flushed from the season's warmth.

You want me to tell you everything,
how my hands tingle with electric fissures
when you seek them in our dark room,
guided by the most pure instinct.

The muscle memory that our tissue imprints,
summoning the letters we've learned
to write along familiar bodies renewed
in the ebbing heat of each scrawled note,
the ones that tell your deepest secret,
the ones that promise you love me.

When you read the entirety
of your essence inked over tine.

Tell me what you really see.

The stars you built and scaled
to flare when we make love,
glowing in our every hollow
with the patience your body demanded.

You knew I should slow down to see
the tiny veins that hold your life's rivers,
the small drum accelerating in your chest
when my lips begin to make you drift,
synapses unravel within and send
the most vague reflexive clues.

A wrist tensing from contact,
the echo in a repeating moan,
the tentative kiss when I slip inside,
all feel like some long buried secret
you parcel out bit by bit.

You want me to tell you everything,
the things that gently flutter,
the things that summon poisonous rage,
how many worlds remain compartmentalized,
which ones are still strangers to you,
which ones are implications of only
possessing half of a heart.

A heart you once said imposed distance,
even while never seeking another.

I won't tell you what that memory did to me,
what apparitions it was able to imprint,
the threadbare nerves affixed to your voice.

I won't ever be able to tell you
how your hands finding mine in the dark
were like chain links that found a way
to encircle one another again
to finally close an aching loop.

When you read the entirety
your essence inked over time,
tell me what you really see.

Turbulent bodies crashing and turning
the lights off to find a way out,
our insides told their own stories
scaled to fit hollows we never abandoned.

The patience your body demanded
knew I should slow down to see
the tiny veins that hold your life's rivers,
that I should trace them line by line
to lead me to where you really come from.

The small drum accelerating in your chest
forgave every beat I may have missed
or treated as cold ambient music.

I'll never name you in this memory,
the note would stroke a chord left too raw,
it should be more than enough for you
to be woven into every filament,
every careful strand holding me together.

You won't see the heavy rain
or know that I saw us as fires
burning with perfect symmetry,
as liquid rapture pouring over darkness.

You won't remember the precise way
the wind invaded our clothes on the way home
like ravenous icy fingers pressing winter
through countless fibers and pores,
through desire's continual relentless tide.

You draped another world around me,
roamed cells with nuances
far more gentle than mine,
With sweet nothings whispered from
a remote outpost where our need blossomed.

And if the entirety of your essence inked
is the only thing you can read,
you don't know the first thing about me.