Fever. Like a red flower blooming under closed lids. Like a warm breath whispering into the ear. Fever. Like flame licking across dried grasslands.
Fever like walls closing in. Like roof falling away. It liberates, it suffocates. It gives feet to the nerve ends.
It escalates. It simmers. And plummets to cold sweat only to surge again. It sighs at every joint. Tells tales hiding under the skin. It turns into red whatever the fingers touch. It turns me inside out. And outside in.
It drips in drops from the porch of my consciousness. It rages and rants and raves inside of me. It fights with me but embraces my body in lethal love.
It is spring fever, like reds of tender leaves I nibbled when I lay down in the grass. It is autumn fever, stripping my soul bare of pretended normalcy.
It is red. Hot. Clear. Dense. Chilling. It is black, swirling in the whorls of my mind. It is blue, washing me out.
It is a thirst, quarrelling with my parched insides. It’s a hunger that eats me up and empties me, mercilessly bringing me down on my knees for the next dole.
He gives me fever.
“Fever when you kiss me ..fever when you hold me tight
Fever In the morning…Fever all through the night.”
He comes in the night. Spreads through my day. He pulls me up, by a string of words, out of the honeyed stupor that I slip into. He paints my waking hours. Lights up my sleeping ones.
He hides, he surfaces and my fever undulates like the calm ocean…smooth, velvety and deep. He gives me fever. Even when I am all cold outside.
I hear poetry. I hear a song. The flutter of a bird and the marching band of invisible ants, tickling across my arm. I quiver at the breath that draws images on my moist shields. And tugs me back by the arm as I turn away. I want to go away. I want to be feverish.
He gives me fever. My very own invisible prince. I fret and flame. Burn and seethe. I love and live and walk with a spring in my step. I am a rainbow that lost its moorings, a colourful balloon in the sky. And he is the fire that feeds my flight. He gives me fever.
Where did my fingers catch this fever? In which instant did fever creep up on me?
I love fever. This fever, my fever. His fever.
