From a Tommy to His Lover

I go to you, your pained and beating heart,
the organ and the Thing that makes you You,
with the tools that are at my disposal:
sight, sound, smell, and touch.
It is a surgical operation, each tool wielded
to open this and that vessel, to determine what's real.

But I do this so that I can also determine
what's real inside me: I find my beating heart
by finding yours, and eating it.

I see your body, shakily undressing itself
in the hard and unadorned light
of this rented room. In a guest house rented
from a woman who'd tear out our hearts if she knew,
and not eat them, but grind them into dust.

It is 1919. A latticework of scar tissue
disfigures your left side. Or so you tell me,
looking away and moving your chest from the light.
I caress it, first with one and then with both hands.
And then start kissing it, hungrily and greedily.
Everything that's you is real,

and all of it's wanted, each part of a piece
and relying on one another like verses that don't end
in full stops. You take my head in your hands
as I suck on your wounds, and play with my hair
as if reading the cards. Finally, it can't be stood.
The dam has held enough water, and suddenly
a leak is sprung.

You moan. Catching yourself, your eyes widen.
You grab and move me to look in my eyes,
to ask if we're about to die. The floorboards settle.
The fire spits and breathes, coals at the bottom
of a lake. We should know better, and yet we don't.

You push me on the bed and are silhouetted
in lamplight through the net curtain.
The straps of your dungarees hang down.
You strip off like an Oxford lout
preparing to skinny dip. I follow suit,
removing my suit.

We rub and writhe and grind
and fill and empty, pouring out and taking in, two magic jugs.
Expressing what we need through forms of need we know.

Learning now, we cover our mouths in turn
as we reach our summits,

like lips
to mouths
in libraries.