The Portrait Of My Extinction

I have never wished me inside of her.

No. This was never about arrival.

Carnal could never carry the weight of what I want to do with her.

As she walks in 

with her robe obliquely guarding 

an abundance

refusing containment, 

the charcoal trail

descending from her navel 

into the tides she hides within,

like scripture before language learned ink

I watch her peel it all off 

like the skin of tangerine, 

as I work up my palette of acrylics. 

I traverse her outlines,

my fingers becoming the brush,

trembling on the narrow bridge

between breath and hunger,

absorbing her and grazing her landscape, 

as if

I was trying to taste

what I was forbidden to consume.

I start from the nape 

with a dash of crimson,

and touch of ochre;

build a temple in her,

only to discover

I had entered one. 

The scent of sweat,

estrogen, progesterone,

soap, shampoo, 

and worn out perfume,

folding into acrylic —

this is what the divine smells like.

And as the colours bleed into her sweat, 

slowly dripping off of her, 

streams through her valleys, 

I kneel, 

my head bowing down

to the earth beneath her,

breathing in the petrichor

that haunts the air in her grasslands,

I watch me crumple into ashen white.