Looking

He looks at me like something and I back myself into this corner and he laughs
I move my hand like he does
Slide down the wall like this; legs splayed at some awkward angle, not because I have to but because I think he might like it
he leaves the room

I am lying on his floor strewn with some kind of rubble and other things, smoking a cigarette.
I look at him with this extensive list of desires or maybe needs.
I am trying to burn them into the back of his neck.
"Fuck off" he says, without turning towards me.
"I'm painting"
he is removing the caps from various tubes of paint, sniffing them tentatively and/or squeezing them onto the back of then -based on some mysterious assessment of the results - he throws them either into a green shoebox or somewhere over there towards a dark corner.
I smoke my cigarette
only it isn't a cigarette
I smoke and feel this overwhelming sadness for the discarded paint lost to that corner.
later, when he's gone out, I gather them and I place them with some care in a box of their own.

His chest is bare and the tattoo of a feather curls across it from near the centre
just here, the place you touch to signify your self
To the right, this delicate arc above the nipple.

Something like dancing
an intense, damp heat and a bass that reverberates exhilarating in my ribcage, my heart and I sway against some arch blond boy wearing mostly white
He pulls at my arm, pulls me outside and the air is cold on my hot, damp skin. I breathe for the first time. People are smoking and there's that smell and there's others - like rotting yeast and sugar, drain and city rain. Around a shallow corner he forces me backwards, my feet disturb bottles.

Now he is looking at me the way I want him to. Like this arrangement of skin and flesh and bone speaks to him about something mysterious and valuable
I don't know
Pupils dilate, a star right there burns and then blur and when I am mesmerised then he falls on me.

Growls obscenities close into my ear until my knees buckle. This, and the bright pain of my arm forced upwards behind my back empties me sufficiently. I am a space, a cypher he can use in order to understand something about himself; blazing there inside me
I am still there resting in this empty space
"Don't -" I whisper, much too late and he makes a fist in my hair and slams my face into the wall. He looks intently at this work, but it's too dark.

At my home I sit on the table and he puts iodine on the cuts with a pale blue handkerchief. He turns the lights up very high because, he says:
he wants to see more