Bitter Wine and Sour Jam

You have inspired in us all a great and terrible art. Every women's life you have put your fingerprints upon now creates in your name with your face bobbing in their vision. I have listened to her songs, she who loved you for so long before I, and have deciphered her hidden meaning. I know what she sings for. I know what the others wrote for. I know the words because I have lived them only in a much more brief fracturing of moments but maybe much more vicious in my denouncements.

How does it feel to have so many words written about your touch, your glance, your end? Can you feel the syllables pouring over your skin like bitter wine. Can you taste those emotions dripping into the corner of your mouth each night to wash over your tongue, thick as sour jam? Can you feel the spear of foul language jabbing into the corners of your brain, quick like bee stings and twice as painful? Can you close your eyes without the letters tearing up and pouring over your delicate lashes?

You were my lover and I hungered for the syntax of your skin against my wrists; your hair laced in my fingertips as I slid closer to your spoken kiss. When you pressed your lips against mine I felt the lips of a thousand lovers who had set against yours. I felt their pain and their ecstasy. I felt their loss at your softly clicking painful hands kneading breasts and cupping ass cheeks. I felt the throbbing in a thousand soft places and the tears that followed soon after.

And I understand this fragile art and the need to create it only to destroy the subject matter that drove such fevered nights and bright stabbing mornings. I understand your flesh as only a true artist of scorned women can. I have come to mold your words around my open mouth until kingdom falls from my teeth and the world turns dark to your sentences once again. I have come to love you and devour you and spit you back up for all the world to see in softly scribbled lines on some crumpled page stapled to the black door of my heart.