(mouth to tail)

I am ravenous and I am edible

You taste of ripened sweetness,

Of tooth-twined pith

 

I am unsexed and painted more terrific than I am

Alabaster, bone-smooth, and iridescent

Yet holier only in the way of 

the Sun in your eyes, of the Earth beneath your fingernails;

Of proximity to You

 

I am no warm-bodied lover

Your fingers cannot sink into the contours of soft flesh,

Cannot thread through my own and weave something gentle, something human;

You will never know of me such bare-footed tenderness

She, you reason, is owed to you

Mouth of pomegranate and toothless desire, metonymy to the delicately feminine

She is fate-woven of yearning flesh and familiar rib and you absorb her again and again

as though pious reclamation of what was always your own

 

Loving her is poetry

Yet, loving me 

Is perversity

An alkaline, sodden-skin type of love;

A moulting desire of the exotic Thing–

Nocturnal and sun-scorn

 

Still, when you make use of me,

We try its shedding on for a size and

We speak of carnality through forked tongue

Soft and warm and human

You plant in me a garden

And remind me I am sin

 

I was never woman to you.

I am androgynous desire

I am foreign and faceless and starkly unwoman and thus guiltlessly wanted

But I remain–

Soft-jawed willingness

Engorged by your sin,

Metallic and serpentine and pungently familiar 

 

I confess:

I am coiled in wait

An Edenic permanence

And I can devour devotedly and

Whole

 

(tail to mouth)

Of tooth-twined pith

You taste of ripened sweetness

But I am edible,

And I am ravenous