Cartography of a Conscious Desire

A poetic collection for Bhang & Renge

I think of you
the way one thinks of a city at dusk:
not by its streets,
but by the light still breathing in its windows.

I don’t touch you.
I sense you.
And in that precise distance
my desire learns to say your name
without breaking it.

There is a language
that isn’t written with letters
nor spoken by the mouth.

It is learned
when your breathing
loses its order near mine
and the world, for a moment,
forgets its grammar.

It isn’t your body
that I desire first.

It is the idea of your body
crossing my mind
like a question
I do not want answered.

After that,
everything else
is consequence.

I like to imagine you slowly.
Desire does not run:
it walks.

It sits,
observes,
waits for the pulse to become honest.

And then,
only then,
it burns.

There is a kind of nakedness
that does not remove clothes.

It begins
when someone stays
even though they could leave.

That is where the erotic begins.
That is where love begins.

When you are not here
my body does not shut down.

It thinks.
It remembers.
It rehearses gestures that never happened.

There are absences
that caress better
than many hands.

Between your world and mine
there is no border:
there is translation.

You read me in silence.
I write you in waiting.

And so,
without grand promises,
we desire each other
like those who guard a flame
that does not wish to burn the night.

Bhang and Renge