Asoka

Earlier at the Louvre when in line to get tickets I said talking about beauty makes me uncomfortable he just grinned and kissed my cheek.
His lips are beautifully soft,
Tender and his tongue hard.
The floor was cutting into my back,
an ache spreading through my body.
He lay on me spent and said he could hear my heart…
Normal?
No, it’s beating fast.
And I thought today as I lay in bed, alone
how he reminds me of a warrior.
His dark eyes and the easy grace of his body,
a model for Rodin I had told him
and he told me his name was a play on Asoka.
I imagine his kohl lined eyes
and an earring where he only sometimes wears one.
It would devastate my senses if I saw him with one.
I want him to devastate
Me with my stomach that reminds him of statues he saw on his first trip to India
in temples.
He said I had a classic beauty,
the last someone talked of my beauty
it was in remembrance of aunties from the seventies in Karachi,
the eyebrows and the ease of body language.
His kind of goddess.
So it’s not me but what they want to see that is beautiful.

I’m sitting and rubbing my back, smiling.
I want it to hurt.