I wanted you right from the start.

As soon as I saw you, all shiny and showing,

inquisitive shimmerings leapt in my neurons,

grew fast and furious, battering synapses,

crashing through cortices,

carrying fire.

 

Bewitched! A thousand fantasies sparked and swirled in frontal lobes.

You shifted shape from mind to page,

drew me in, singing from a sheet I thought we shared.

And I could hear you, siren,

calling me

with lullabies and leading me

from cliff to edge.

 

I could smell it, all the dirt in you, depravity,

and maddening, I tried to spell,

to re-imagine you with ink;

carve and sweat you into life, pick at fraying metaphor,

stain your face and teeth

with my own belief and truth.

 

I wanted to roll around on the floor,

drink from you, thirsty for flow;

to seize you and hold you, to write to control you,

to taste you, to take you within me. 

My needles were knitting up narrative patterns,

confining, defining, cutting you out,

outlining and shutting you down.

 

Wildly resisting, you cantered then galloped

then broke free of language,

threw off the saddle I’d fastened, so tight;

spat out the bit that was holding your tongue

and took off up all the wrong roads.

 

You wouldn’t lie low, refused to keep still.

You wriggled in anarchy, kicked at my ankles,

biting and scratching, I broke all my nails on you.

Bruising my frame, my structure collapsed

with multiple failings.

 

And lying still, subsumed in you,

I hear you laugh maniacally

in vortices you made from me.

 

Wayward, no container holds the fullness of what could have been.