Naked Woman Playing A Burning Cello

In the gap between sleep and dreams she sits,
her music a crushing lightness upon you,
thin red ribbon of desire
tight around your throat.
Her bare flames, a phonecall
from a smoke of voice, half-familiar,
bathed in fog.

She pours her forearm forward
in a question mark deja vu
that carries up over the slope of her shoulder,
slow walk through the bright-flowered fields of total madness.

Your body holds itself in a paralyzed slump,
enslaved by the gradual morse code
broadcast between ember and ash.
The curve of her back is a knife edge searing through your ribs,
like being destroyed by a feather.
As the flames beneath her fingers begin to sing a death song
in the key of hollow twilight minor,
you start to sway,
the notes gorging themselves upon your vertigo,
all your molecules running together like watercolor,
ecstatic sex of dissonance,
your lungs a palace of drowning,
ready to let in the flood.

When she finally looks at you,
at the top of the precipice she has built,
you can feel yourself go,
your cables cut clean,
an elevator in the throes of a swan dive plummet,
frenzied rush of stories pressed into manic lights and sounds that kiss you as you pass,
the sharp lines that geometry begs for from the chalkboard,
all things frozen at another level now,
breasts pressed against the wood,
gravity's grey anger spread below you,
perfection,

and then blissful nothing.

When you no longer hear the music,
it is not that she has stopped playing,
it is that you have unravelled from your spool
into a heartache of yellow thread,
gone endless upon the floor.