LUST

Artist: Emma Statham - "Lust"- Part of the Seven Deadly Sins series.

You came to me before your body did. 

Long before your hands, before your mouth,

before the first impossible mercy of touch, 

you arrived as weather.

Not the weather that gathers above us,

but the weather that gathers within the earth-

the slow accumulation of unbearable pressure,

continents shifting by fractions,

mountains learning they were always meant to implode. 

You moved through me with the silent authority of the moon,

drawing tides from blackened waters that knew no kindness. 

Something in me began turning towards you 

like a blind dog on a leash,

seeking only your tug on my collar, 

careless of direction, and of consequence. 

I have wondered whether God created flesh

because light alone could never bear this much longing.

So when you stood before me, the bold flesh of you,

suddenly the world became divisible: 

everything that was you,

and everything that was waiting to become you.

Do you know what it is to want

another person until language fractures,

to reach the edge of speech and find only breathing?

For the body has words the tongue cannot survive.

I wanted to learn yours.

Not to possess you, for possession is for collectors,

for kings, for frightened men who mistake ownership for love.

No, I wanted something far more impossible:

To leave the shape of my soul upon yours,

the way rivers leave themselves inside valleys,

the way fire writes its black scripture into wood,

the way centuries enter bark until even the quaking Aspen

cannot remember its first name.

I wanted you so completely that absence itself

became another country, and every hour without you

required translation.

What cruelty, to imprison consciousness inside separate bodies, 

to know that somewhere your blood is making its bright journey 

without mine intertwined. 

There are nights when I think creation itself was an act of lust. 

Why else divide what was whole,

unless reunion was always meant to be irresistible?

Come closer. Taste me. Come closer still.

Come

Until your heartbeat begins correcting mine,

until memory can no longer distinguish

which of us first carried this desire,

until your name is no longer something I say,

but something my bones remember before I wake.

Oh, there are hungers that end, that are satisfied, forgotten. 

Not this. 

This is the oldest force I know, the one that 

teaches stars to collapse into themselves, 

the one that draws tides across the dark body of the earth.

The one that convinced my solitary life

that somewhere there existed

a you for whom I would have gladly become

entirely undone.

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