Wash Poem by Oliver Roberts

From the edge of the dark you came,
cutting through the angry tide with your naked sails.
In the luscious haze you shone like a lazy star
and rippled the night out towards my shadows.
You beamed the sea from your eyes,
weeping a vinous kiss from their colours,
and flowering it in a smooth petal on my tongue.

Together we drifted in and out of each other like drunk mystics,
pushing and pulling at the sea like a sordid moon.
The room glowed with the soft voices of our skins,
their sweaty cries resounding past the locked door and penetrating a listening,
a listening which came from those deep places in you that I’d always wanted to hear.
Outside the open window things broke apart in night’s effortless spaces,
and the waves, the waves, the waves spilt their gatherings, and died again.

When we rested I listened to your jewellery swaying as you toppled down.
We formed together in the white light like two silencing sparks;
me hiding you inside my damp, reclusive caves,
and you encasing my open face inside yours.
I slept and boiled with you and we drew wet portraits of dreams with our drowsy mouths,
inventing new shapes that mimicked what were waiting to do to each other next.
In the morning, I watched you wake and writhe and gleam beneath me like the stirring sea.