hips and breasts and lips and heat and sweat and fat and greed

flesh is heretic.
my body is a witch.

i am burning it.

yes i am torching
her curves and paps and wiles.
they scorch in my self denials.

how she meshed my head
in the half-truths
of her fevers

till i renounced
milk and honey
and the taste of lunch.
 

i vomited
her hungers.
now the bitch is burning.

i am starved and curveless.
i am skin and bone.
she has learned her lesson.
 

thin as a rib
i turn in sleep.
my dreams probe

a claustrophobia
a sensuous enclosure.

how warm it was and wide

once by a warm drum,
once by the song of his breath
and in his sleeping side.

only a little more,
only a few more days
sinless, foodless,
 

i will slip
back into him again
as if i had never been away.

caged so
i will grow
angular and holy

past pain,
keeping his heart
such company

as will make me forget
in a small space
the fall

into forked dark,
into python needs
heaving to hips and breasts
and lips and heat
and sweat and fat and greed. 

- eavan boland