On this Day of Happiness

On this day of happiness, I want to melt like a sweet in your mouth. That wasn't really what I intended to be writing to you, but I'm writing it so it must be true. I woke to a window that wasn't there, full of blue light. A picture in a frame of what the day could be. We have reached the equinox, the year's first hinge. Bella is here with her torn dress and her smudged mouth, trailing the bedsheets like a crinoline behind her, defying me not to desire her ruinous magic.
I confess she does look beautiful, bendable, biddable. When she hauls herself across my lap and asks me to spank her I shall do it for you. The cracked mirror above our bed hangs onto good luck by the meagrest of threads. In my dreams I stare at my reflection hoping to recognise somebody, but I am disappearing; I am impossibly tiny behind the sopranos, even in my high heels. I am wearing my scuffed red stilettos. I have come fully equipped for glory. You wrote to me I was your sex goddess and I warned you then that immortals make bad lovers. Oh to be fresh-faced again. To run barefoot through the sand with you, towards the cliffs where we can flirt with God and teeter on the brink of the everyday magic of kindness.
You are my equal. Even Bella concedes that as she wipes your spunk from her breasts. Crazy. She only got them out to see desire light up in your face. The she spits like a sommelier, into her teacup. Ah well, our happiness might be spiky happiness but it is happiness nonetheless.
Come here then, come to my arms. Feel the crenelations across my back, across my shoulders where once my wings were torn. Now there's hardly a scar, just a blur on the skin, as though the light, falling there, had sliced me for its own purposes. Which it has. Here, take off your halo come and learn to lie with me.
Yes come and learn to lie with me. Bella is in the corner going down on the rag and bone man, who has closed his one good eye in ecstasy. The red end of his lit cigarette moves in time to her breathing. From the grubby lining of her camisole she passes me a note without once losing her rhythm. It says you are considering taking orders. So, come. I have summoned up a salt storm for us. Let's improvise around our nakedness; I have torn down the moth-eaten red velvet curtains for you; wrap me in the tasseled silk shawl, take me to the rocks. I want to see my body reflected in the three-way mirror of the sky, the sea and your face when you are coming.
Communicate with me only through touch, let's originate a new braille. Follow the water to find your way. Come outside, quickly, before the light fails us. Let's leave this room,with all its texts of inconstancy: my knickers burning in the grate, my red lipstick melting on the mantlepiece. Here, outside the briar rose releases its perfume of spilled silk and weak tea. The cobalt canal boat sinks into the garden's green embrace. I am stumbling in my scuffed stilettos. I am disappearing. Don't let me fall. If we must live this life, let it be for all the right reasons. Kiss me. I promise you after me everyone else will taste of nothing. Don't mind Bella on all fours with Verve Clinker. There are cracks behind every painting. Touch me here and here and here. You don't know what you do to me, in this place, beneath the voluptuous storm, on this day of happiness.

The copyright of this post belongs to Claire Steele