Botany

She tastes like sweat and dirt and grass whenever I have touched my lips to the soles of her feet. The insides of her socks, the Earth and whichever lesson in botany she’s given me that day. She smells like me in every place that I’ve already put my hands, from her calves to that spot below her belly button. The back of her neck where her hair has met my fingers or her throat where palm and swords have been. She looks like chocolate chips to Labrador retrievers, like a bottle to an addict on a friend’s clean kitchen counter. Like pills that smother you and steal the warmth from your body, slowly, over the course of an hour or so. She feels like someone holding your head underwater when you’re tired of waking up to the same old day for thirty years. She feels like when you want to jump from cliff to stones below and paint the prettiest picture possible, with deep reds and the blue hues from a silent sun bouncing blindly off the surface. She sounds like when you used to try and sneak silently through the house without waking up your father and his rage, she sounds like the belt coming out of each and every loop and the leather being gripped. She sounds like when you stifled your own screams in case that bought you grace. I taste the tears that come rolling down her cheeks and I taste the spots she tries so hard to deny me access to. I taste the obedience in her eyes and the subtle yet supple restraint on either set of lips. I smell the scent of blood and flower petals, both floating in the same water I might crash upon and break under the weight of. I smell the sighs that she lets out when arms come stretching down and seek to steal a strand of hair or two from me for spells. I look like rabid dogs that scratch at wooden doors and chew their way into your home when all the rabbits have been slaughtered. I look like bodies strewn about between the meadow like upsetting constellations, the kind that you would come across and think of witches and the Devil. I look a mess of a man and yet kept together by the lust that holds me up. I sound like shrieking sirens and the drink that beats down galleons, like the dull roar of something terrifying contemplating if the sails should come down or if the men should be throttled one by one. I sound like nurseries engulfed in firestorms and bleating sheep deboned by wolves. I think that what I am is drawn and quartered, hung from one wrist and one ankle and draped across the confines of her mind. I imagine that she is little more than what I find myself mistreated by but all I’ve ever really known. I think all women are the same to me. Some thing to aim to please and fold up into shapes that I find pretty.