Buttoned up to the neck in black
you gaze back through the picture
glass at me and I wonder what it'd be like
to be your lover thrilled by the challenge
of your stare which dares me to do it
and then suddenly I feel heady
like I'd been out all day
in the sun.

Breathless with my desire for you
and your desire for me/or someone else
I undress before your image...

Your eyes, dilated with desire for what you see
before you or for what is in your head burn
through the glass like the sun through a greenhouse.

I am a lightning rod shaking in the storms of your passions
you carry in your breast and in your womb
and my mind becomes elastic with lives I'm longing to live.
Sweat shivers down my backbone and I feel like your gaze
has removed something from me like a protective husk
and now all my organs are visible, and so are yours:
our skin is so translucent like the flesh of a flower you can see

all our ducts and veins under it with the red that flows along
from the organs which are so beautiful
you want to stick your hand in to break the skin like the surface
of a pond, grab the things within like water creatures
that loiter, or glide around inside our bodies like thoughts or fish.

I imagine now we lie down together,
you open your legs showing me your great beauty
and smiling, a gorgeous great red bow of lips
seeming to tug together the ends of the earth
which smells like flowers crushed in seawater.

The nerves of your spine are like harpstrings under my touch;
the pyramids of your nipples the colour of bruised ripe
strawberries harden under my fingertips...
Suddenly, at last, for real alone here in my room
my thick white rain falls on the glass,
over your lips, your face....

the above is a poem from "The Greenhouse", a collection of stories and poems by Brian Fogarty. To download free extracts from my published novels, stories, and poems, and to see some of my paintings visit my website www.brianfogarty.com

I want to belong not where I am but where I am going. Sometimes I hardly even feel human. I feel I've just arrived here from somewhere and I haven't really got a clue what happens next or what I'm supposed to do. I don't know how to behave, how to respond to life, how or what I should feel. Are there some rules?