Let me tell you again about the dream I have where I wake up in a bed across the Atlantic.

The dream where you are settled on my skin, still asleep.

You are all lips and freckles.

In this dream you speak before you wake and you tell me, “hold my hand, hold my hand,” and your voice to me is like god ****** gospel.

When they open, your eyes are not your eyes—they are more like the only navigable sea I’ve ever known, and you’re looking not at me, but past me.

The dream where the air around us thickens and I reach out a fingertip, but when I touch you I go right through you.

Our skins ripple and move in waves as we fade into shades of cerulean that soak into the sheets, disappearing like bathwater.

for years I have felt of stone
pale, grey-veined marble untouched by bare hands
separated by barriers tangible and otherwise

my skin was lusting for the heat of humanity
I missed you the way a stillborn misses the intake of breath
until the day you invited me into your bed and
took a chisel to my heart and head

these cracks run deep

you can be found in the magma below my belly button
the pure pumice coming from between my lips
I may have jagged ridges with the power to cut
because I am viscous yet

may you dance through these fractures like water and soften my edges

within each of us is the spiraling turbulence of a pacific wave
undoubtedly powerful, an ever present energy
able to shift like the tectonic plates or like a hummingbird's wings
to elevate euphoria or trap souls in sea foam

You were like a brand new table. I bought you because you looked stable and very nice. I thought you were glossy and smooth, so i ran my fingers along your surface, and I flinched as I got a blister. But the blister was a seed; you deceived me. A seed was forced in me, and I bled eight drops of blood that day. The roots sternly took their territory in me, and kept growing very slowly. I noticed my skin started to open, around my arms. The next day, there were buds on my skin. Weeks to come, lotus flowers had covered my entire body. They were tinted pink from the blood in their roots. The openings became infected but I couldn't see; the lotus covered my body. I didn't mind. It didn't hurt. You seemed as if you being a part of me had no use to you whilst I was rotting away in what I thought was bliss. You knew nothing of how much of me you infected. But it's okay, I liked it. It was different. You were different. You were my lotus infection.

Sprawled and etched underneath your delicate skin. Lines of blue and indigo travel up your forearms and push out adrenaline. Dark as ink, poisoning ones very soul. I trace the wicked lines with the very tips of my finger and you break out in shivers. The very lines that fascinate me, I want to make a home out of your veins. I want to be within your every being, I want to be the very thing that makes you feel alive.