“Patience is bitter, but its fruit is sweet.” ~ Aristotle

Things I would like to do with you Indoors.

It is snowing, outside, gathering fog that is not fog but blizzard—I saw it while I was bicycling home through the fading light, the storm flowing down the mountain canyon.

We can do things, together.

We can turn off my home’s heat: we will need to sweat together to keep one another warm.

We can paint little birds and a big tree on the stairwell wall, together.

You can bake, and I will help cut the pale green apples. But I will eat most of what I cut so you kick me out but I do not leave, I interfere with your apron.

I would like to touch your mouth, and then listen to it.

It is full, and pink, or is it red? Or is it slightly purple, or orange? I can not tell—your make up is subtle. Your eyebrows are not—they are dark and fine, yet bold.

Words, words: these are not merely pretty words. Your eyebrows are garish, yet musical. How’s that?

Your hair is long, and wild, and messy (I like it that way). You are good at this, and that, and this, and that: you are your own muse.

February: the holiday lights are gone dark. No presents. No family, no cheer. But the cold makes us stronger, and more appreciative when the hot days and candy-colored flowers do return. This is not the time to escape to a postcard vacation beach blue ocean island. This is a time to feel your hunger. A time to finally focus in on what you dream of. Forget entertainment. Fun can be a distraction—there will be time for lounging with umbrella drinks and finally learning to surf. When I will pick you up after I scuba dive for the first time, you whisper: let’s go home…and I agree. But not now. Now is your time for getting ‘er done.

I would like to look into your orange eyes, or are they brown, the daylight would tell me, but it is dark, and I am lying next to you, listening to you rant about something I do not care about. Perhaps you are neurotic: but you are wild, you are careless in the way that beautiful children who grow up in safe neighborhoods are. As a child, in winter you slid on your sled down the middle of your street, unafraid of traffic. Or, in summer you played horse on a hoop set safely in front of your house, ball on hip and moody smile when a car dared drive down your exclusive street.

February here is all too dead and gray, and winter now is too long and cold. But hold on to your wool blanket, dress warmly, now is your season to focus: even winter is getting tired, though it appears indefatigable.

I would make love into you, but I must be careful—you light me up like dry paper, and I dare not get too close. But, like paper, too, I dare not pause once I am too close, or I shall burn up without even touching your flame with my tongue. I am hungry for you. It is late and I am full and I should not eat you, but I want to, and you want to, so we enjoy a second helping.

But: you are far away, which is all that protects you from me.

You are unfairly talented: the gods put all their powers into your clay, leaving a thousand of us beige. But I am an arrogant mortal…was it Prometheus?—who would like to challenge the high gods, and we shall marry, and birth a little half-god, a demi-god, and even as you burn me up I will smile into your fiery eyes.

I have been tested and beaten but still I come back. I have walked a long time, and alone, but still I keep walking. I have never given up or even come close to giving up, really: even when I have come close to giving up, my core is warm.

Your style is top of the low continent, 1920s; or Café City with long cigarettes and languid talk of intellectual revolution, or 1970s’ second-wave feminism with too-large glasses and narrow slacks with wide bottoms, tall boots, or a dress and a leather purse and a silk blouse. Your style is black and white, but you paint in color.

We like to swim: I wriggle and pull and gain strength under the water. I know why you are a mermaid, and I would like to fish you, but I like fish, so I do not fish you.

You have questionable taste in boys, which means I stand a chance. My smile is wide and crooked with you, and my voice grows loud and my throat hurts—life is a bruising affair and I grin my way through the line.

Bicycling through salt, slush, over ice and packed snow, gray snow, tan snow, black snow, snow. Dismounting when there is too much snow, and walking virginal prints into the quiet white night snowfall, yellow streetlights and your warm beating heart far away in your second-floor apartment: I can still hear it but only when you listen for mine.

Your neck is kissable, it is a better thing to kiss than your dark lips, because I like to hear you talk.

I would make love to your mind, and argue with it, and when we are tired and sweaty, salt, sweat, water, we would dive one, two, splash, ripple, into the pale turquoise saltwater ocean.

I am as-if tan, my freckles have just about all joined as-if into one. I climb, when I have a spare hour. I bicycle between things. I sail from shore to shore. I work too hard for too long, and smoke rises from my bent but fit body. I go to yoga and unbend and open. But at the end of eleven years I still see another mountain above, and I am tired. I am patient, and walk like an elephant, with modesty and exertion, but I would bend into you, instead of my cool sheets, I would bend into your full breasts and sigh into your chest, if you were asleep, and I would take you out and charm you, and take you in and we would play. And we would pray into our orgasm, instead of into myth, our heaven is right here, it is not found above vacant clouds circling a mountain peak or in books that smell like coriander.

I would steal poetry from your heart, and leave it for you to read with tea, your heart, my words, bound in a book of tan paper. I would make love into you in the morning, and in the evening, and if you wake, we would make love, and if I awake, I will pull you to me.

I would like someone sharp, and I would like someone soft. I would like you to challenge me, even as you enjoy me. I would like someone sweet, I would like to hear your laughter: laughter is fire and space, and space provides the opportunity for two to fly together, instead of crowding our wings into one other’s path.

My words have all been offered, as a prayer, once, twice, eleven times, a thousand times: but they are my mantra, and you are my practice, and our cherry love may be our fruition.

Or, it may not. Either way, Spring will rise. But not yet.

Get your copy of Things I would like to do with You.

Read more Things:

Things I would not like to know about the future Love of my Life.

Things I would like to do with You when I am Drunk.

Things I would like to do this White Winter without You.

Things I would have Liked to Say to You the Last Time we ever Spoke.

Things I would like for us to know before we Fall in Love.

Things I would like to say to you without you Knowing.

I would like to hear from you when you are confused.

Before I lose you, I would like to see you again and again.

Things I would like to do with you in Time.

Things I would like to Remember about our First Kiss.

Things I Would Like to do with You this Evening.

Things I Would Like to Do with You in the Woods.

Things I would like to do with you in the Snow.

Things I would like to do with you on Valentine’s Day.

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