How does your want show itself?

Do you reach out with your fingers to grab or do you sit back and burn with it? Do you take things or do you let them slip past you, regret coloring your days? Do you let your desire move you like a marionettist or do you stew inside it and yearn, building fortresses in the air?

See, there is this thing that dances with small steps, click-click tap-tap, on my skin. It presses a heel behind my knees and makes them buckle. They knock against each other and I fall. I fall and my palms hold me up from banging my skull on the gravel. I breathe slowly, on my hands and knees. Staring down at the gravel and feeling the welts in their birth from the press of rock against my palms and knees. They will grow and bulge raised off of my skin, evidence of my stoning. Is it still stoning when you hit the rocks yourself?

The dancer goes click-click on my skin once more, flattening me against the gravel and now I birth welts on my face too. My mouth presses against the rocks and one slips into it. I do not spit it out. This is the cost of desire. This weight of a dancer going tap-tap presses me against the ground with nowhere to run. I struggle against the dancing thing but I accept my fate, like prey and its snare. Desire, the thing on my skin, sits on my back, pressing me against the gravel, daring me to shake it off. Will the pressure on my skin make me break and scream out, calling my desire by its name?

Desire grows a mouth and the mouth speaks, the mouth says good-bye and lies once more, uttering journey mercies despite my wanting to plead for the subject of my desire to stay. It deceives despite my wanting to bite down on my prey’s neck, hold it down with my sharpened teeth, have it bleed out on my lips and into my mouth. Consume it whole.

Desire pushes me to my limit, gravel on skin, taunting me to pick a side — to yearn or to capture?

Desire runs a finger on my nape, moving my matted locs to the side, caressing my scalp, desire burns blue. It burns entirely to ash. Desire screams with teeth bared, it shrieks like a banshee prophesying death. It prophesies my drowning in it with glazed-over eyes, blown-out pupils, shallow breaths, and lungs filled with it.

Desire crystalizes on my lips, body saturated by it. My lips harden with its crystals and my skin is taut from struggling against it. Desire makes me dance, it helps me up from the gravel with my forming welts, hand held out and we waltz. We move together and behold, I turn into the thing that goes click-click tap-tap. I become the dance, the dancer, the thing — want in its rawest form.

A promise of gratification always slips from desire’s lips just like a glass slips from wet fingers; both shatters. Shards of glass pierce skin and it bleeds, a promise cuts open a heart, holding it open with two hands, stretching it wide, and letting the blood from the atria spatter onto the floor, a promise severs when unfulfilled. Desire promises gratification but what happens when this does not occur?

Want is rabid when unaddressed, it shakes like a kettle that has been on the stove for too long, it burns. Wanting something is a sin in some places because of the things people do when they want. It destroys civilizations, and splits brothers apart — a ravenous serpent that bites, poisoning the pure at heart. Want kills.

Want is devious, a mistress who you will never own, dangerously beautiful and burning all the same. A cut on your skin that is infected and festering, no blood left of it, rot ensuing. Want is a curse and a blessing in the same breath.

What is want to you? How do you desire? How does your want show itself?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Photo by Stacey Koenitz on Unsplash