Cup of Crossroads

I didn't know that I was thirsty for your voice 

until I heard it once more...

I want to pour it into a bottomless cup with endless refills. 

I want you to read aloud to me when you run out of things to say. 

Novels. Recipes. Directions. Ingredients. Manifestos. 

I want to see myself the way you remember me. 

Remember me as the nymph that I was, and remember me again as the last autumn cicada.

But what would you do with my tattered flesh and shredded soul?

Maybe gather me up and swallow me whole? 

Come be my snake and I your egg. We will swallow each other down.

We will become the ouroboros.

We will finish each other...

I want to smear the sweat on your forehead with my thumb and trace the creases of puzzlement and wonder.

I want to enter your eyes and be squeezed out as tears of joy... 

Wander through your arteries 

as round red bites of oxygen tickling the capillaries in your toes...

I want to become the snot that comes out of your nose. 

Soothe these sore unused muscles with your semen and spit creating a healing balm...

Touch me until your fingerprints wear away.

Send filaments of light out of your palm... 

Wind them around my head like a glowing nimbus crown.

You gave me, back to me.

What can I give you?

We will take a short run on the road we didn't follow, smelling of sex and ectoplasm.

I will dance you to death.

I will whirl you into my funnel of gleaming vanta darkness. 

You will receive me and open me and pass me through the calm of your steady clear light. 

Turbulent peace is calling...

Yearning, that makes the salmon swim home and the owls sing us to sleep.

I am a bucket full of sea

I am siren-song undertow

The flow of the current is in me.

Give me your coral branch in exchange for my pearl.

My bounty and mystery are yours to know.

Translating glyphs and half-remembered dreams while indulging in this gift of lost and found. 

Conjuring in coiled tongues, 

we tell our stories that smell of

re-written biographies kept as snapshots buried in the ground.  

Blend and merge fiction with fact.

Grasp gristle in the left hand...

Throw salt with the right...

Making good on our forbidden pact. 

We stand at the crossroads 

where we promised to meet

during a conversation that we never had...

This daydream leaves me even more thirsty and sad.

Your voice and laughter fades and drifts away across an ocean of fantasy. 

For a moment I thought I saw

our gourami mouths drool with gratitude and greed. 

Yet here my mouth is only full of salty sea.

All of you is again far away from all of me.

I spit in my cup and watch the tide recede.

K. Meaker

November 15, 2023