Jeremiah 14

I stroked her hair, drier than the wind that blew through rotting sheaves that lined the pathway to the door. I wondered when we would eat the wood, how its chips would taste: What would its browness feel like, gliding down our throat - would it glide, or would it stick and give us splinters in the larynx? By that time, we won't care, I suppose. Like passion for a lover, hunger will come upon us - our flesh will swell with its glory, our stomachs pull inward like the clenching of thighs, and we will forget - what, exactly? Happiness? No, we have long since forgotten that, along with love, sadness, and all those other human emotions. Like the true animals that we are, we spend our days engrossed in the struggle for survival. We scrounge around for food, the way we used to scrounge around for lovers - it all comes back to sex, I suppose. I want to say something corny, like "I have left certainties behind". I want to write poems about kisses and flowers. I want to lie: to lay, here, stroking your hair, just a little while longer, kissing the wind with withered lips, too tired to caress you with my words - they burn on my tongue, like lack of water - please don't say "like lack of love". I am not convinced love's not more than a bit of leftover acid in the cerebellum - or is that sadness? It gets confusing. So let me bury the nose of my not-yet-corpse into your body, stronger than the winds that fade like night-time, more breakable than those damned pieces of straw that line the foyer, where stroking your hair, I lie: Kisses and flowers.