Reptile Lover

The reptile lover peers out from the eyes of all the meth men I’ve loved. Puff by glass puff he assembles his pieces before me. In Justin I see the reptile lover’s teeth; in Alex the beak that encases them. His scales chafe my skin when I’m grinding on Spencer. Beneath Jared’s bed is a sloughed-off dead skin. He shows me a grin like a wolf’s when he’s Scott. When he’s Frank I first see faint impressions of wings. But it’s Chris who will prove the most suitable vessel for the reptile lover’s emergence. Chris in the leather, with the neon pink punk hair. I have you, he tells me, and marks me to prove it, his blood, sweat and piss intermingling on their journey through the heart of me, through my cavities and tubes, infecting my being with the reptile lover’s queer rhythms, his satin bowerbird’s cackling courtship dance.

We’ll go to our island, he whispers. To the beach.

We spin a cocoon there from syringes and beach glass, and wrapped in its warmth I prepare to receive him. Above me Chris quivers, cracks open, releases the reptile lover within. The light that pours out from the skin sac where Chris was belongs to no spectrum of color I know. The sound that emerges is likewise a mystery, not music or language but nearer to static that pierces my brain and inscribes its strange message with needling precision on the eye of my mind.

Of course you’ve forgotten our prior encounters. Such is the amnesia your species enjoys. No matter. There’s thousands and thousands of meetings left to come. The lifetimes you’ve lived and the ones you have yet to—in each one I find you. I never give up. You’ve been promised to me since the age before time: my princess, my lover, my eternal betrothed. Give into me now, or wait till next lifetime. Go ahead: keep me waiting, my dark angel bride, for pleasures grow sweeter the more we postpone them and lovers like I weary not of the waltz.

I keep a black cat at the foot of my bed now, and a second to prowl the forest outside. Even still there are times when I feel him around me. I test out new methods of letting him go. I pray to Ishwara, Chenrezik and Jesus. Been sober forever, it feels like these days. And on nights when the reptile lover still visits, I repeat till I almost believe them the words I forgive, I forgive,

I forgive.