The Shape of Desire

What is the shape of desire? What is its form, it’s boundary, it’s motion?

Inside my gut, electric movement.

Does desire have tendrils, the kind that spread like mist beneath the skin until the body hums, a slow seeping? Or does it come quick and blinding, the lighting strike that rents the heart into fragments that, with shaking fingers, we try to reform before we are unmade entirely?

What is the shape of desire on my lips? The feel of words slipping through my teeth, the staccato ‘t’ that ends the word want and leaves, for just a moment, my lips parted to breathe in the taste of the air you occupy. I roll the words around my mouth, savor them like a delicacy, a bite of fine chocolate, a hand-made truffle of language and feeling that sits sweet on my tongue, melting against the heat.

The scent of you. Warm, familiar, the spice of your skin, the musk of your sweat. Leather and clove, rich, reminiscent of petrichor. What do we smell like together? We reek of sex, a cologne of time and urgency, a perfume of thresholds and ache.

Is desire this feeling like craving, a word that tastes like the scratching and clawing of need, the sharp pierce of teeth in moments of masochism that bring the ethereal crashing down into this sensory body that is relearning how to accept pleasure? Raw, hungry ache, the kind that lays a path in the darkness, the kind that tells me to trust the tenacity of my feet. Is this the movement of desire dancing across my skin, drifting back like fog to entice and caress your skin?

Or does it pulse like wire, like lifeblood painted the color of your soul and plunged deep into my heart, a two-way socket that embodies relativity and has no concept of space or time or social appropriateness?

Does it live in your eyes, and mine? Is this how we dance, in unfathomable depths that plunge below the muck and filth of shame?

The cadence of your voice, the quiet slowness of language selected with intention. The crescendo of your laughter, a hint of teasing, the slow unclenching. What is the shape and form of your desire? Does it echo across these cavernous halls, or do I take the extent to which you live in wanting for granted?

How we tremble and shake the air that passes between us. How we sit with bated breath, heartbeats pounding vibrations in our ears. How we circle and circle back, testing forward motion against the precipice. The shape of desire shifting and twisting, sometimes in words, other times in heartbeats, velvet edges and piercing sensations. Curling toes, lips pulled and pressed against teeth, the quiet moans, uncertainty and urge commingled in legs, intertwined in bedsheets. The scent of you wrapped in my hair and flying haphazardly out the window with trailing smoke.

The rhythm of your voice against my skin. We push and pull, desire elastic, unbound from these sensations like

the tempo of your heartbeat and

the depth of your breathing and

the clench/unclench of your fists and

the dangerous chasm opening between your eyes and mine.

Would I know your desire, it’s shape and feel and taste and smell and sight, if you painted it across my skin, or would I believe that this is simply the taste and feel and shape and smell of you?