Arms across shoulders. A small dance of everything muted but this slight movement of your arm against mine. Hands brushes across hipbones and goosebumps bloom across bodies; an awareness of skin and fingertips. When illicitness was adventure and messiness like being alive, this kind of thing was so much fun. Noticing, not noticing, pretending not to notice, moving, pretending not to move, your hands, your hips. Desire kicks up like a gale. Now, I think, let hands do what lips do, they ask first. I draw my lines with the idea that when you want what you want, you should be able to say it out loud. Honor the risk we take when we speak our own desires. Engage in nothing if it is not consensual. Consent means honesty, realism, a self-awareness of one's possibilities and limitations. How scary it is to move slower, to ask first. But revolutions are built from nothing more than people's relationships with each other. We are all we have. I want to see you in the morning. I want to see you next year.
My lips pray instead of kiss. Make desire easier. Turn the lights back on. Give us ease with which to ask and say. Let us abandon patriarchal methods of communication forever. Let us learn/relearn wiser ways.
communication is the tending of each other's secret worlds
community is an intricate network of relationships
I will never know what's going on for you
unless I ask.
