Inquietação – The restlessness of young love.

Come to me and find rest;
Delight in a sky eclipsed by my smiling face.

Combing hair behind your ear,
I pluck a white flower and plant it in your hair.

You seek the reddest, most beautiful strawberry— as a hart a pool of water— to clothe its fuzzy
Nakedness with the motherese of your lips on the bed of your tongue.

They live in a secret island near my heart,
In a valley where all emotions gather after sorrow’s rain irrigates my landscapes;

Their delicate, seed-spangled flesh gleams a gloss not yet defiled by human gaze,
Embracing it with a guillotine of teeth.

At first, you nibble only the tip of the berry
Leaving me the round stump to enjoy.

The sweet-savory of your breath
Encrusts in the juices soaking my beard’s coffee coarse strands.

Each bite elicits a sensation hot enough to warm two bodies,
But once you taste the blood of my fruit, you bite hard and deep.

You gorge on the strawberries of my misfortune,
Poisoned not with death, but love.

Their perfume intoxicates the bees singing their buzzed motets to the gods
Those who sprout with the compost of parental neglect,

Their sweetness from the bitter memories of the “what would they say?” and the “what did they say?”
In an adult language that I learned to speak when my child eyes stopped being so,

After seeing God’s absence from my short life.
The fruit from my vines was as big as dreams dead,

Heavier than Persian pomegranates in late September.
The silk of your naughty fingers pull strawberries of all the colors living inside the red.

You pollinate my lips fresh with new wine, not yet fermented in your eyes,
The most delicious song your throat has sung echoes in my mouth.

I take the last strawberry and squeeze its muscled form on your nape,
Trickling thin on the petite of your back,

Down into a feline smile that grins its way into your buttocks;
Its battered body of tiny eyes watch mute as our bodies lay in the waste of its green crowns.

Lay your head on me and rest;
My chest is empty, my throat full of heart;

It weeps with the wind bouncing off the trefoil leaves, concealing our faces from the sun,
Warming our satiated stomachs,

Groped by its jealousy that does not settle for just caressing your white breasts full of maternal milk:
Moaning for the children we will never have.

You want more, but I am barren.
You want other fruits, but I am strawberries.

Photo by Brody Vissers