©2008 mykl sivak

Corpus

They told me to use my words,
but when my word failed
I used my body instead.

Stripped nude, pressed nude,
against the body of a girl,
silent too, except

the sound of her breath,
hot moist against my ears
and neck,

The sounds of where
our bodies met,
because fluids and motion
made sounds there.

I entered her with finger
and phallus, because our minds
were forever separate,

because the mind is a place
where words dissolve
in acidic abstraction,

where the loneliness
of experience cannot
be expelled by words.

My words could not
invade her psyche,
because the mind is not
really a place for words.

My body carried me
across the ocean,
to Netherlands’
alcoholic night,

to meet the strange
body of another
whose face, name and voice
would fade not long afterward,
dissolved in my mind
into puddles of synaptic
mystery.

My tongue probed her
mouth, her tongue
probed mine.

With silent lips we kissed,
not for love but for fear,
not for lust but lonesome
self-misuse,

a communion of flesh,
acceptance of the bodily,
to eschew verbal justification,
to embrace embracing.

in mutual solitude, we laid
in naked darkness,
each of us clinging
to a stranger.

My fingertips felt the Braille
of her back, a constellation
of moles I never saw,

but still in my mind
the imprint holds.

I know their formation,
better, even now, as
a distant strange acquaintance,
then she could ever
know herself.