How to be Cold

Perhaps you have read
too many romance novels,

that is why you tend to
overemphasize and dramatize
emotions. Pain, lust, joy:

Your chest doesn’t just hurt.
You have to have a fist
squeezing your heart.

You cannot simply be horny—
your fingertips have to tingle
with desire, your skin hum.

You are not merely smiling,
rather rapture overflows and
floods your entire face.

And now you are tired, no
spent: passion, after all, requires
that you give and give and give.

But remember your science class.
Cold only exists in reference: a function
of being in contact with a hotter entity.

How, at a touch, at an instant
heat is transferred, absorbed,
sucked greedily into the frigid body.

But your fingers on my skin
disregard this hunger for warmth, ignore
the desperate need for equilibrium,

register nothing, but
the difference in temperature.