sacred was cozy in bed with scared- so comfortable with one another, so similar
just a slight rearrangement of letters with a climbing over to the other side of c
completely changing the sound and mood
you have exhausted me- you said- with all your expectations
but what have I expected?
too much- you said- and now we can only be friendsbut friend is one letter away from fiend and has the word end embedded in it
like a tick or a leech feeding off the blood of its host
I sucked your blood dry and I sucked your cock too till there was nothing left
nothing
and now I suck like a baby on the only thing that remainsmy shriveled thumb sliding in and out of my mouth
mourning for the loss of a decade of passion that failed to lead us anywhere but right
here
mourning your moans of pleasure and hunger when I licked your stiff upper lip
until your body shook like a wet dog and you ran with the other wet dogs
away from me
and when I saw my ex- the one before you
he said-you were an all or nothing kind of gal
more ‘all’ than nothing- I retorted with a self-conscious little laugh like it was a joke
like our marriage had been one-big-joke
he was the hungriest of the wet dogs in the pack with that wet dog smell
lingering in my nostrils and on my tongue
he wanted me to swallow and choke on the bones of our wordsa word like fail which lugs around the heaviness of ail and sounds an awful lot like
fall
holding up the lead-laden word all- which drags behind two of the letter “l”
like my two husbands afraid I would clip them to a leash and take the lead
but I knew better than thatchanging l to d transforms sound and meaning
lead becomes dead
I wasn’t suicidal.