Poem I

Bitter as wormwood or Turkish coffee, absinthian abandon; this passion stings and burns. Cheeks blaze with the scarlet sign and stigma and your teeth leave their signature on my hips. Prudence we shed like the ash tapped off my cigarette with trembling fingertips. This bed is an ocean in which I choose to drown- sore each morning from being crushed by your waves. Ninety-proof ecstasy scalds as you swallow, but you, oh so deliciously, melt. The scars will be there only because the body could not bear the pleasure that it felt.