ode to keats

"Make love to me as if you're breathing poetry."
He was a boy who had read Keats for school, but she was a girl who breathed Keats to butterflies. Her smell was of a leaf freshly thorn, and her skin, so soft and white, like the sound of the word lily. He whispered "lily" to himself late at night, and shook with the need to take her. When she was anxious, her breath came in short gasps; it made her breasts shiver, and he'd multiply his words to comfort her, because he didn't want to quiet the quiver of her breasts too soon. Her eyes scared him. They were too soft, too soft, and she cried tears so beautiful they made him want to hurt her. He pressed his thumbs against her skin, forever finding new places to remember as his favorite. Her skin bruised easily, but he scarcely ever left thumbprints. He wanted to tear her apart. She didn't leave the first night they met, but slept curled beside him, not touching him. Her dreams slipped into his, so that he awoke in a haze of pink dusk and powdered faces. He couldn't shake off the haze for days, and when she slept beside him a second time, the haze never fully left. The first night they made love, she took him to the woods and told him to listen to the trees as she stared into the moon. She took his hands in hers, whispering about the trees, the trees, as she guided his hands to slip her out of her clothes. Then she was naked in the moonlight, but she stripped him of his skin, slid atop him, and froze him in time, although all he wanted was to take her. He broke flower petals in his hands on sunny days, ripping with dead eyes, but the smell of freshly broken petals always stopped him, froze his breath, made him remember her lips whispering Keats to the butterflies. Once he shouted Keats over the mountains, threw a book of Sappho into the sea, and read Poe as he'd read a eulogy. But she always chose those days to tuck her head under his chin and breathe poetry into his skin.
He wanted to take her, to see tears stain her cheeks. But her tears were the milky way, and they froze on her face, stopping time and space as he lost himself in the heavens spread like rain across her skin. Soft like the sound of lily. He pressed his thumbs against her breasts, trailed to trace her hips, thumbs fluttering soft like butterflies. And she broke, crying, her face wet with tears, so he lost himself in her, drowning in the depths of space. Questions without words filled his skin. He pressed his arms against her breasts, elbows in her waist, stretched her arms above her head, held her, watching as the light slid down her skin. His breath left pools of heat puddled on her skin. She burned, and he was lost, remembering rose dusk, Keats whispered to butterflies, and tears of the milky way.
"You're beautiful," he whispered in her ear. And his words spoke the truth.