And Other Acts of Masochism

In that soft and beautiful haze between awake
and asleep I conjure you. A ghost with too many ghosts,
but I alone ask for this visitation.

The sound of the TV in the next room
crackles and dies and the rain at my window
suffers a similar static death.

I trace the lines of the generic Chinese characters
on my duvet, and don’t realise you’re here
until our fingers collide on one flicked black branch.

You, with your dark hair and green-grey eyes like pond water in jars,
cast no shadow on my wall. You roll me from my cocoon
of bed sheets until I lay there, as blank as a page, awaiting a quill.

Cool fingers tread carefully on my skin, circling
the black hole of my navel. And those eyes are suspended
above me like two strange stars in the murky galaxy of my bedroom.

Your touch blurs the lines between imagination
and dreaming; I don’t realise I've slept until I wake with arms
wrapped around myself to the sound of a dull alarm

and a green-grey dawn.