She was hands and claws groping, harsh
in the neon back room, her flesh
sweating sugared wine and cheap perfume.

Tell me what you want, she said,
tell me what you want, but I was too drunk
to articulate the raging of all my dreams.

The sourness of age trembled
in the tracery of lines on her face.

I listened hard to her breathing,
I listened hard to the movement of her tongue,
but still I couldn’t hear her story.

We coupled:
lost ourselves in folds of caustic flesh;
strained violently towards unthinking oblivion,
the blankness of orgasm,
the wet mess of biochemistry.

She came to me like a sacrificial lamb:
her powdered scented flesh, an offering.
She steered me through blurred corridors
and took my fingers in her mouth,
promising sweetness I had never understood,
her eyes full of all the sorrows of the world.

I wanted to give her a fix of joy, to bathe her
in the cold sharp exhilaration of life, to fill her
with more than just moist emptiness.

I wanted to untangle the barbs,
to loose the briars, to heal her wounds.

She was a Christ, a Madonna, a Magdalene:
the blood of saints stirring inside her skin.
She was a sacrament,
a Goddess who extinguished herself for love
and she was sorely mocked for all her giving.