marked

in my hands
I want you
in the pit of my stomach
and behind my eyes
your hair an inked brush
has marked my cheek, my lips, indelibly;
any chiromancer now can read from me
the brown-egg smoothness of your shoulder,
the sapling strength of your leg; the tracery
of your ribs will glow, a secret dye,
under the UV light of eternity,
stencilled across my palms,
branded across my arms
I am filled perilously with the grief of joy
its intolerable burden, its raging discontent:
doomed, damned to carry this weight and magic of you
nowhere farther than the grave

-- GPL 1987 D. A. Clarke