Words: Rachel Currie (she/her)
Pressed permanently against the cold corner of the classroom
I watch as she brushes her hair –
The steady experience of travelling down
Those long lengths of honey-hued silk
Traced and retraced, time and time again,
Into a velvet mussed shape of syrupy gold.
I clutch feeble fibres as they fall onto my desk
Licking my lips in their sweetened direction.
She smells of long Sunday mornings,
Of mourning dew and Earl Grey doves.
The toll of the old school bell breaks through her melody as
My ear rings with the pealing sound of slow, smarting suffering –
The sweet sin of my desire
A closing wound ruthlessly picked apart and apart.
I witness her experience the world,
Wondering at the dreamlike matter echoing through the vast secret of her mind.
What is it like?
To love, and be loved?
Is it beautiful?
I do not know it.
If it exists, its shadowy form evades my watchful eye.
I know shame.
It lives in me, its dogged pants sounding in my ear.
It has fermented inside my open mouth
Its rot moulded against the sallow shape of my aching, tired body.
My existence is a wrong thing.
The world does not want to see it
Nor do the shaking heads of the balding priests to whom I kneel and confess
My perversion
All mine.
To understand it, to know it, is a sin.
But
Her Heaven-sent existence pulls me toward a ragged cliff of wrongdoing
As I resist the tasered beams of the scriptures that tether me
To a closed, controlling world.
The doctrines dictating my life have told me it is false,
Yet it is the only thing I know to be true;
That curling, feathered ball of desire
Is golden,
A connective tissue stringing me to her.
I trace her small smattering of freckles in my sleep
And hold her hand tenderly as we endure our wakeful existence.
I exist,
A tumbling perversion of wrong and right
Turning in the broken washing machine of my brain
My life a dirty and dreadful disorder
I choose to live with her.
It exists,
It is vibrant and true
Its mellow music reverberates, echoing through resplendent rooms,
The twisting chambers of my beating heart.
The water laps around my fair ankles,
Its salt softly kissing my lips.
And the winter sun is so bright,
An aureate arc bending between doming dunes.
It is blinding, brilliant, beautiful.
I know love
It lives in sun-kissed skin and stupid decisions,
Its sweet song sounding in my ear.
The burn tastes sweeter than the scar.
I know love:
It is savoured in the moon-drunk magic of ordinary life
As we dance together in the evening light
Skin tracing skin, tasting the trembling beauty of impossibility.
I know love.
It thrives in the outdoors:
The chaotic, cornerless capacity of the far-reaching earth.
It exists inside of me,
It is the purest thing I have ever known.
