Strange Dancers pt. 6

6. Respite

She finds me on the quiet and dark shores 

Which with no luminous crown overhead

Lets the fossils in the quarry walls

Remain in their calcified age

Kept from that same verdancy which this body too lacks

Without which I am made a sibling of these fossils

The shore has given up on me and the kneading sea

Reaches towards my stilled form

Prone and exhausted of motion

The tide knows only time stands before its claim.

Her hands find me in each space she assesses

Crawling up my calf and prodding my knee into reflexion

She seeks something I have lost or misplaced 

Within these confines her fingers trace a path 

Up my thigh and examine my pelvis

She is as rhythmic and measured as I am 

Unconsciously firm as always happens and

She laughs and clucks in Thai for she is not Malay 

Having been brought here as much for her skill

As the absence of inhibition which compels it.

I am transparent beneath her fingertips.

Her fingers find my collar bone and

Throat still stiff all over with locked nerves

She is tumbling through this labyrinth, me

Her fingers carve through knobs of

Unresolved days along the planes

Of fascia which hold me rigid

My whole body swollen with

Unwilled tumescence ready to be

Unstoppered.

Her fingers sand away unknot muscles 

An callused edge of her thumb is her carpenter's plane 

Its many decades, many they are

Her gravity at least as present as the lines which score her face

Wisely apportioned as she leans into her strokes 

She kneads a driving force as she planes me

Soft and level and smooth as though she knows my contours

She toys with my ears and brow

Her fingers explore my lips and tongue

Finding jumbled combinations which lock me.

She creeps into my cavernous mouth

One digit at a time until like a fish dumb and gaffed

Hooked in her grasp her hands caress my throat

From within and under pressure 

An ancient breath forgotten within me bellows out

Her elbows widening my jaw

My eyes flickering as she is

Surgical in her diagnoses

She slips into me completely and I am paralyzed

With another form fully within my own

I am the skin she wears as she unfolds herself 

Into my each and every limb and extension.

Her dive into me complete and

She seeps into my marrow

Her fingers dissolves and like

Gossamer filaments flow outward

Infusing intracellular space

Outward from my cells and in sweeping

Brush-fronds like coral feathers she sweeps me out

With gentle pressure she filters my blood with her

Ten thousand feathery implements as she breathes

With me she converses freely as well as those others who

Lie in remnant memory in myriad forgotten spaces 

Only she bears witness to those who were once company.

She withdraws slowly from this costume

She makes me breathe through the cramps 

Withdrawn she shakes off a magnetic ash

Of inorganic matters caked and flaking off her own skin

No baser denominations than these which from me she takes.

Her fingers probe my pelvis and

She rolls me over limp like a rubber mannequin

Face down flat and folds towels across my hind

She applies oils which glint of starlight upon me

Thighs and all and leans her whole self upon my

Unrepentant joints.

These joints pop and my inner atmosphere gasps

She reads the pressure trapped within my ears 

Behind tight ringing eardrums which remember gunfire.

A toe at a time under her pull

And she kneads me at the

Waist and runs rings around

My anus with the pads of her

Thumbs and loosens me slowly

At a wrist's depth I feel her caressing a 

Frozen bladder and stoking my liver 

Warming it and then kidneys responding

Slowly she untangles my lymph

Its rivers commencing to their tasks 

Of hormonal titration once more.

At an elbow’s depth her fingers appear 

Pressing outward within my belly

Reseating my sternum next as

Her second arm enters me

And gripping my ribs she pulls

Herself through stirring mucous finally

Wakened and viscous and warming

As her toes disappear within

My ribs are her ladder-rungs

Upwards into me and this tumescence

Is expressed in mechanical orgasm.

She is finished

I am emptied.

She trickles out in drops

Stringed together with a cohesion

Long absent from a disjointed

Narrative to which she has

Restored my faithful articles

And objects and refreshed the

Distinction of my subject

She withdraws and with that adhesive trail

Strings wet glimmering drops like stars

On that diaphanous veil which reminds

Her of her abandoned mythology and origin.

She maps me out plying skin with her palms

She spreads my scrotum between a thumb and forefinger

Reading veins like a fortuneteller

Seeking the cause of my catatonia.

Taking my limp stamen between her lips

She suckles me to stirring

She laughs and clucks and with two hands

Kisses my crown and shares with me in being

Newly rejeweled.