Seduction by Fruit

Seduction by Fruit

Drunk, in your cider sweet breath,
I devour the scent of apples,
Clinging madly to the last bite.
She shakes her head in disappointment.

Plucking the raisin tips
Of your ripe mango breasts.
Stop, she says, before I
Have to get up and leave.

Picked up each of your angry words,
Peeled them off like Litchis,
To expose the sweetness' within.
Nice, she says, but not enough.

String you out into six hundred
Soft gasps of pleasure,
Swallowed whole or peeled like
Quivering grapes between my teeth.

She says nothing,
Takes three perfect grapes,
And crushes them
Between her perfect teeth.

She smiles and waits with
A knowing patience for
Me to kiss the drop
Of juice beside her lips.

Memories of Water

Memories of Water

Alone, on a parched day I
Wander silent empty rooms,
My dry soles beating out a
Rhythm of distant liquid longings.

I put myself under a bathroom shower
And in my private rainstorm
Watch cold jewels slip down my
Skin and shatter noiselessly.

I drink in the shower water.
I cannot get enough.
I suck dry taps, bottles, ice-cubes,
Freezer frost till I threaten to burst.

And then I lie silent
On the cold cold floor, and
The liquid inside me dreams. I
Am a cold floating ocean of dreams.

And the water dreams of sunlight
Like sweet music that kisses it
With the honey lips of morning,
As gentle as the dawn.

It dreams of days when it
Wrapped itself in a cloak of sky
And ran past rocks singing
Brightly into their hard ears.

And it dreams also of darknesses,
Of running through rocky caverns,
And lying ever so still in
Silent virgin pools like grey mirrors.

The water dreams of men also.
Inside of me, it slop slop slops
Against the inside of my skull,
Dissolving memories into itself.

I saw a man being beaten once.
They whipped him with leather belts
And curses, and I watched
Awash in a sea of impotence.

It was a murky grey-skied day,
The kind that hatred breeds. Either
The man would bleed or it would rain.
Red drops fell when clear ones didn't.

I do not know if he died there.
I do not know if he lived afterwards.
I do not know if he sobbed and sobbed
In shame as I was never able to.

On the floor I turn over and over,
Until the tears come in a tide.
I lie face down, palms down,
Lips touching the salt wet tiles.

I get up and shower again.
I watch the water run into
The drain dragging skin and hair
With it and I realise something.

Water remembers, but it cannot see.
It accepts, it absorbs, it swallows
What comes to it without question
Or comment. It cannot be sated.

It lies still on wet floors,
In closed taps, on kitchen counters,
In glasses, in bottles, in the air
We breathe in and out. In our bodies.

It hears me sleeping and waking, talking
And listening and alone and embraced.
It hears me make love to my wife and
To myself. It hears me laughing.

And yet it cannot know what a man
Is. What a woman is. It
Cannot count the million lovely breaths
The flow in and out of a breast.

It carries only shadows in itself,
Flat mirror images of feeling.
And yet the sea is endless. The sea
Holds worlds and worlds within itself.

And I feel the substance of myself
Drawn slowly to the sea,
Down the long fingers of time,
Breath by whispering breath.