Voyeur


I have become a voyeur.
I memorize the way your chest
lifts when you sleep, how your eyes
take on the color of breaking waves
whenever you say my name, that slight
catch in your throat when you slide
past the sheen of my thighs
to enter me.

I wonder if age will bend us
until our vision snaps,
break this spell,
throw motes into our eyes
so we no longer see in each other
what we now see.

Tonight, the sky is a thousand
blackbirds,  a chocolate sea.
The moon bobs on its surface.
Our names are engraved in its smile, but

the future lies uncoded
in the palms of our hands.
Tomorrow new legs, fresh lipstick
could appear. I envision you,
swollen taut, her hips pillowed over
silken sheets & decadent bedspread,
as your buttocks, pale as that lover's moon,
rise and fall on top of her.
Her screech is a fingernail,
your back her blackboard.
New poems are writ by your tongue
onto the rise of her clitoris.
This whore, this phantom
groupie, perhaps your poetry student
tongues similes onto your hardness,
circles metaphors around your peaked nipples,
quotes Sexton when your hands lift her hips
high yet again, becomes Juliet as you finally
die your own small deaths together,
me off-stage right, watching.

Pris Campbell
©2007
(revised 2008)



Image: Found on a medical site.



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