The Treatise

He wrote her name on borrowed air,
letters curling like smoke
from the tip of his tongue.

She never read it,
never saw the way his hands shook,
or the times he pressed her shadow
into the page, his fingers
still smelling of her.

Her thighs, a slow hunger,
pressed against his memory.
He dreamed the taste of her—
salt and skin,
the way her moans cracked open the code.

Her body burned
like an altar inside his chest,
a wound he prayed to,
knowing it would never heal.

She was silk and teeth,
her voice a match-strike,
her hips a question
he answered too late.

But men grow small in the face of love.
He swallowed his words,
buried them under his ribs
where they pulsed and ached.

The treatise lived in his bones,
a fever that burned out by morning.
Its ink dissolved in the sweat of regret.

He dreams her still:
the way her laugh curled like a vine,
her touch, the weight of a thousand stars.
She lingers in bars,
in songs no one else hears,
in the quiet after the music stops.

She’s gone, of course.
Her laughter stays locked in the walls.
His hands, empty,
trace her name on air that doesn't remember.

But silence spreads,
like frost on the mouth of a wound.
Regret is a seed
he buries deep,
though it keeps blooming,
keeps blooming.

Now he writes of fleeting bodies,
of mouths that open and never close,
of love that slips through fingers,
wet and wanting,
and of nights that end too soon.