The Cost of Touch

The Cost of Touch

I mistook hunger for devotion once,

your hands spoke vows your mouth never held.

Love wore a borrowed face in low light,

and I paid in pieces of myself.

You learned my pulse like a bad habit,

fed the silence with practiced desire.

Promises tasted of metal and heat,

want dressed itself as care.

Anger came late, heavy and earned,

when truth stopped flinching from my eyes.

I saw how longing can bruise the soul,

how lies breathe easiest in beds.

Lust kept knocking like a trusted friend,

bringing flowers cut from someone else’s field.

It wanted nothing except my forgetting,

my name said without meaning.

I stood in the wreckage of what we rehearsed,

counting the cost of each tender word.

Affection had fingerprints all over the damage,

and none of them were love.

Now I carry a quieter kind of fire,

one that warms without taking skin.

Desire no longer gets to decide,

who I become in the dark.

If love returns, it will arrive clean,

without theatre, without debt.

Until then I keep my anger honest,

and my body no longer negotiates.