{ Justin Chin: Travelogue. }

[delga]

Travelogue
by Justin Chin

I want to make love to you
in 15 hotel rooms
                        in 14 cities.
I want to wake with the infant delight
of finding your body held
between two freshly laundered white sheets,
lightly perfumed by the smell
of these hotel room staples.

                       In this room, available
to all with an open and ready wallet,
where hundreds, perhaps thousands,
            have wandered through,
& in this bed,
where hundreds, perhaps thousands,
      have slept, have made love in ––
some frenzied & violent:
the spread kicked to the floor,
the sheets entangled in sweating limbs;
others clean & calm:
everything folded away neatly,
every act wiped away with hand towels.
I will know that in this one night,
this container of the temporary,
this Tupperware of wanderlust
will know what it means to be stained
with the fragments of the ghost of my craving
as it flits from one more room,
one more city, one more hotel with you.
We'll move as early pioneers did.
Wholly uncertain of what lay ahead
but heart-pounding anticipating
a pool of clear water to cleanse and quench,
a goodness, a feasting,
a soft place to lay heads,
                                        rest bodies.

Once I had this daydream.
We were traveling together in Tibet.
I wondered what it would be like
to kiss you in a light December Tibetan drizzle.
How the thunder would grumble in
a strange tongue, how the trees would smell
different,
           the air different.

& amidst all this foreignness,
      I would realize
the shocking familiarity of your kiss.
I would know what you taste like
even as jasmine and saffron melt on my tongue,
& as patchouli burners cloud my nose.
I would hold you to my mouth and say,
           This is the first
           of a million kisses.

              Come,
take it from me.