Frogs' Legs

Frogs' Legs

We met under a gut-punched sky, the raindrops racing down the tight screen of slipped out breath that caught in the space between our two neon egos – spitting sparks in the downpour.

Through a fudge of boiled rice conversation, I reached inside your brine and found the chalk of you; graffiti-scarred myself, in fingernail wounds, into your smoothness and laughed .

“Give me back my soul,” I said, “I dropped it into the amber jewel pool of your eyes, while I was playing with your innards.”

“That’s not your soul,” you said, “that is only the sun, a bright gold ball reflected.”

I called you, “Toad,” and ran. The grass, like bottle glass, cut my feet and you, Hunter, licked up that garnet trail all the slow way to my door.

You dined on my defeat. Delivered up on plates of gold: pomegranate, passion, fig all patulous; ‘Cuisses de Nymphe a l'Aurore’.

Ever after then, you bound me in a forest of words, so that I lie now: Ophelia and inked-over by your own tongue.

I blink out, through the black-string bars of a story that I refuse, still, to claim and reach for each new princess as if, through her, I could regain a purchase on the world and stand again - under that bruised sky; a spectrum of spilled blood, pooling under porcelain...

If, then I would make my order quick – ‘Cuisses de grenouille’ – end you with a finger lick.