[M] Whirda's Poetry & Prose

[PepsiWhirda]

Swiss-Made Woman

I’ll never forget the look
she gave me after
she came. It was her
way of saying that
I was one fuck closer
to outliving my usefulness -
that she lived in a world
in which I could only,
untenably, exist.

Between her thighs, or at
the bottom of her ballet dancer
spine (it’s a matter of perspective,
really), is where empires have
fallen.  I used to wonder
if she ever thought back to
pushing that first domino.  I
wondered which domino I was.

She was a Swiss-made woman,
and I always admired her
craftsmanship.  I wanted to dip
my fingertips in cartographer’s
ink and make a map of her -
to make lonely mountains
of her hipbones, oceans of her
eyes - to write here be dragons!
on her lips, and warn unwary
adventurers of her smile.

She couldn’t have cut
more daylight out of me
with a thousand knives
than with that smile.

When we fucked, I
blew out the candles
to escape it.  There are
no differences in the
dark.  For all its depth,
there is no room for
inadequacy.  She never
complained when I took her
down there.  I suppose she
must have liked it better
that way too.

I always knew what awaited
me, though,  when the lights came
back on.  The carnivore stare that
denied all my alcoholic dreams
of a world where sobriety and
solace deny physics and
occupy the same space.  Of
sharing that world with her.

Every time, when it was over
and she dressed to go, and I
thought it would never happen
again, not like that, I asked for
death.  When I looked
into eyes that used to go
forever and no longer saw the
sea, I begged her to kill me.

She never did, of course.
That was far too much
like sleep for a Swiss-made
woman to give me.