To Perish in His Flames

His tobasco tongue has licked me swollen
Pinned me against mottled iron
Calves against hips
Hands against wrists
Crying against his shoulders in ecstasy
As he sucks the hot meat from my bones

He makes demands of my elastic skin
Scalded nipples kissing his thumbs like molten glass
He is a demi-god of liquid lead
His body the tempest at the heart of an inferno
Terrible to see
My flesh like ancient paper
Smolders at the fringes
Ready to ignite

The worst part of him
Bruises its way up my inner thigh
Inconsiderate and blind
All veins and convulsions and slick pressure
Trailing beads of fiery fluid
Its questing habanero tip
Commands me to burn for him
But I am no witch
I will not be his kindling

I want to tell him “no”
That I am but a word, fluttering
An inconsequential word in a library of books
A breath, a syllable
Hidden in musty racks
I want him to come find me
I want him to spend eternity flipping through pages
Until he can finally speak my name

He laughs a dragon's laugh
With glowing eyes of ripening red
And spins me a new tale
Where a library is consumed by purging flame
And anguished stories cry out as they feed his lust
Nobody to open their pages

Still kissing his way down my breastbone
He leaves a necklace of painful cankers
And stops just above my heart
Lowering his mouth, I tense with feverish bliss
He bites down with a “pop”
Juices drizzling from his chin as if from a succulent plum
Mingling with 100 proof saliva

He rolls my heart between his teeth
Then spits the gory mass into his palm
His imperious instruction: “Burn”
We both watch and feel the sting of the anti-climatic
A weak thump is his only reply
As I knew it would be

I take my heart from him
Wipe off the spittle and put it back between my ribs
With fathomless disdain
My hands encircle his hips as I mount him
My lips smothering his
Tasting my own blood
And ride the incubus down into the dust

The world spins around us
And the flames rise up
Until both sky and air are a conflagration
He roars in pleasure
Snarls and arches and tries to tear through my thin paper arms
Which pin him to the ground
His mindless carnality
Begging me to be his fuel

But I remain like paper
Smooth, cool
Unmalleable

The incandescence inside him begins to gutter
Oily blood growing stagnant
Heat fading
Cannibalized by my white-hot disregard
His own folly turned him to ash
My heart will never burn for lust

I stumble away from his remains
An incubus's fire
Banked deep and dead inside me
Maybe I am a witch after all
But I will never burn for him