I was horrified the other night, to catch you scraping your knees against the clawed foot of my ivory bath tub. You said they itched, and I asked you to please come back to bed. I should have known then to start growing out my nails, but I have always hated the feeling of having long nails.
At what point do we stop to grow and start to age? I looked to you on the floor, you with red knees and sour milk skin. You still managed to intimidate me into lust. Do not think I am resentful, it is I who tell you that even if the milk is sour we might still use it to make pancakes, knowing full well neither of us will want breakfast.
We are always very full from dinner.
Yes, you kneeled before me (before your knees were red) and I ate deviously. You made me put butter on a scone. I ate things from the ocean, too.
You are the rose I read about. The rose that has the look of a flower that has been looked at.
It is good to have a you. (Even the ephemeral you, because it transcends your desire to be you)
Something I doubt you know is, you is you or me, you and me, you with me, you without me, or me alone, me in the rose-garden at smokefall, you striking a cigarette up my thigh, me dancing in the back of your beautiful head!
Or
You is the rose-garden alone, empty at smokefall, neither of us yet born, or perhaps we have both already died. Perhaps there are dew-faced children picking the roses from the roots.
But in my dreams that are most like hard peaches, you are the red kneed skeleton in the rose-garden at smokefall. Fill my words with the red blossom sweetness of the sweat of my red rose-garden! You catch the ripe juices (the stale wetness) in the wonderful slope from your ribcage downwards. We are drunk and full and wholesomely sinful.
I am the cold steam of the early hour.
My red-kneed love!