Finger Exercise

Begin with alliteration. For example: flickering firelight, tentative tenderness, shivering shorelines, preempt this predicament, cling to comeuppance, feline feelings, hapless hunger, wanton wanting, cloven clocks.

Begin with: caress as a caveat, primal as prelude, dance, darling, do, climax to the clandestine, fall from fastenings, culminate in crying. Bristle, break, bruise.

Alphabetize: decry, demand, desecrate, desire, desolate, despair, desultory.

Forget assonance--it is imperative that I infer nothing from these impressions of impetuousness. Impossibilities inspire inevitabilities.

Start anew with simile: you are like the word luminous; you and I are like two erstwhile distant lights touching, parting, touching again; my heart, like something--anything--about to burst at the seams; you, as near to me as someone--anyone--in the next room. That room is always locked, like something--anything--marked restricted.

Linger in metaphor: I would like to sink in you, I would like to swirl in you, I would like to drown in you; we were one in a parallel universe--here, we are parallel lines; you gather me in your fist and I submit; help me reach those heights, Love, I am in flight with your wings; you are the word luminous; we clasp and become a single flame.

End the way things always end: pictures that blur, edges that tear, breathlessness, a gaze, a question, a word, a tree.

Look, my Love, I have written you a story.