Love Me with the Lights On

Open me like a book;

Wet your fingers with your tongue to turn the pages

Devour me like your life is a hellscape

And I am where you go to escape it.

Run your fingers along my edges;

Trace out the words written there

As if every page is a prayer,

Or a promise.

Say my name the same way you call out to a God you don’t believe in

In a moment of desperation.

Love me louder than any natural disaster.

Love me,

In a way that will scare even the thunder.

Open yourself up like a story that is just getting started,

Everything, still entirely unedited;

Let me see you with all the lights on,

Exposed without the cover of darkness,

Naked in a way that gives me all the answers.

Let my fingers trace the surface of your skin

In a way that splits you open like a fruit.

Let my tongue taste the sweetness.

Let me use it to find out

Everything you think of religion

And the voice you use when you call out to heaven.

Crawl inside me without any invitation;

Get inside my ribcage

And unravel everything you find there.

This is your permission.

Indeed you to know me with all the familiarity

Of the salt and the sea,

Of a tree and its leaves,

Of a trembling girl and all her ugly.

I need you to know me

In my entirety and vulnerability;

I need you to see, all my jagged edges

And to still look at me with wanting.

To still tell me you love me.

That is why I never hold back when we are fucking.

I let you see everything.

I let you leave the lights on.

I consciously restrain myself from withdrawing,

And instead,

Let you crack my spine and devour me.

Still, you love me,

Love me loud enough to wake the entire country.

It is a foreign concept to a girl

Who still can’t look in the mirror somedays,

But I do everything in my power not to fight it.

I reach out to you and feel you unfurl under my fingers

Like a peacock, spreading its fan of feathers,

And in this way, both of our insides come together.

Like glass or soap bubbles we are beautiful in our transparency,

Beautiful in our fragility.

Held so tightly against my body,

You have the power to destroy me,

And I, I have the power to destroy you,

And every day we put faith in the fact that that is something we wouldn’t do.

Some people call this love.

I settle tentatively

On self-inflicted,

Slow release

Destruction.

I am told that it is a testament to my cynicism,

But I am just coming to terms with how quickly

I forgot my entire sense of self-preservation.