The Bargain of Want

His hunger is a blade, whetted on the silk  
of her nearness, slicing need into the humid air.  
Not a chase, but a prowl – his eyes  
like lanterns swung through mist,  
devouring the sway of her shadow.  
He wants her sprawl, her unraveling,  
three times before the sun claws free,  
each collision a slick treaty with the beast  
that chews his bones, ravenous.  
Her skin under his palms hums,  
a fevered psalm only he can sing.  

She is no quarry, no offering.  
Her want is a house woven from murmurs,  
rooms aglow with the slow burn of shared silences,  
a table where his words might linger,  
savored like salt on her tongue.  
She’d rather braid him into her days-
his laugh a knot, his gaze a thread-
than be undone by his the pull,  
her body a coin spent too often.  
Yet his touch, when it finds her,  
is a current, pooling low, reluctant and alive.  

They meet in the raw calculus of need,  
where desire is a barter, never even.  
He offers the heft of his hands,  
calloused, mapping her curves like a pilgrim’s prayer;  
she offers the arch of her spine,  
a bridge she crosses, half-willing,  
to a place where their wants tangle  
like roots in thirst-cracked earth.  
Her sighs are a currency, his whispers a debt.  

Not surrender, but a pact –
her flesh for his stories,  
his heat for her stillness.  
Neither gets the whole feast.  
He leaves, half-sated,  
her scent a burr in his throat;  
she stays, half-woven,  
craving the mortar of his nearness.  

Yet in their friction, something else kindles-
a purpose, sharp as flint,  
struck from the dull insistence of their lacks.  
Not just for them, but through them,  
like a design etched in the tension itself.  
A knowing hand, unseen,  
crafted this push past comfort,  
this dance of too-much and not-enough.  
It sees the beauty in their strain,  
the necessity of their half-fulfilled hungers,  
and calls it good –
a spark to keep the world turning  
on its bruised, stubborn axis.