The Last Frontier

And here I am again, in your bedroom in the basement, my head against your chest because I need to move into it. It’s got some part of me lashed to its ribcage and I struggle to bungee right back to it. I’ve got to know everything about you, will perform surgery on your body and your soul, skin surgery, just what I can find out by holding a glass up to the wall. I could feel your heartbeat coming down the stairs, the smell of your body, one that I’ll remember years from now, that lets me know that I can. That I’m here with that bit in your ribcage again. And there are your lips, and I seriously want to cry because I know I’ll have to leave them sometime, to get up and earn my keep or change my clothes or buy a tax sticker for the car. And the breath. Have we had a new one lately? It seems that all we do is trade the same one, mist and bonfires and your toes in mine.

We’re flat out against each other and my instinct is to raise my legs. You take them in your elbows and sway them and we gasp, but you won’t do it. I lie and pant and want to scream, but you won’t. Some stupid barrier in your brain. Something left over from walking in on your parents fucking, or some retarded religious bullshit from your choir boy days, or your uncle slapping your dick with a newspaper when you were caught masturbating. I know it’s not me. And I know better than to try, that I could make you run away, that you’ve put all this on a pedestal so high that now it’s just habit, saying no to me, and to everyone else. And that’s the thing. I hold up for you anyway, petrified, but writhing, ready to come just being close to it. And you hold, still kissing me, still having confessed to loving me once a week in a broken cough, because that three word agent makes a mess of whatever it’s representing. I know you’re thinking about it. My eyes shut tight and I go Zen thoughtless, only waiting for that, the thing I want so bad, the last frontier of contact with you. And it doesn’t come. My legs are returned to the bed and I’m turned and spooned. Neither one of us needs to look at the other’s face anymore. My fingers dig into a pillow and I press it into my chest. So I don’t smother you with it. The object of all of my affections, cold and as fucked up as me.