Jeremiah 14 (Alternate Draft)

I stroke your hair, drier than the wind that blows through rotting sheaves lining the pathway to the door: How will it's wood taste? What will the browness feel like, gliding down our throat - or will it stick,  giving 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.

If love is no more than a bit of leftover acid in the cerebellum, 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.

If kisses can burn like wood, can lies rot like flowers?

The dried wind blows through sheaves lining the pathway to the door. I stroke your hair. How will the wood taste, when we can taste no more?