"your love"

​by C. Ikpoh

As precious as a kiss is, your love refuses to embrace its tenderness. My lips are  penetrated by the needles within yours. Blood courses over my mandible as your magnetic hold on my face increases in strength. Your fingers rake my skin as perfectly angled blades, peeling my flesh from me. This is your love. It pricks my exposed nerves, torturing me one synapse at a time, sending my brain into a frenzy of agony. Yet, I cannot refuse you. You remain in me as much as my own heart. To rip you out would cause a death of the greatest proportions. How is it then that you are also the death of me? How is it you are cancerous to my well-being? I need your life and your death. I desire your hopeless poison. It is the fuel that drives me, motivates me, sustains me. Your incarnation of death in my bones makes me undead, alive to drink of all the things under the fountain of stars above. I quench my thirst with your venomous saliva. Satiated is a state I shall forever forget. Kiss me again with your needles. Bleed my lips of what they hold. Drain me of my old and replace me with a new; replaced with a cold breath of singular purpose. Infuse damnation into my tongue. May I speak the words of the dead, translated by voices of the decrepit. Peel me of all my fragility. Make me invulnerable. Give me a love only you can. Give me your love.