I know boys don't wear jewels, but I'd wear a string of your pearls.

I’ve whispered with the wild flowers stitched onto my mattress,
and gossiped with the wives living in the watercolors on my walls—
they know how anxious I am to love.
Sometimes, we’ll burn the midnight oil—
under a cathedral built from wooden chairs, broomsticks and old bed sheets—
sipping a sweetened whisky brew,
gathering wool and spinning his golden image
from straw and scraps of fancy:

Sturdy and steadfast, graceful and diplomatic.
Eloquent and sincere, protecting and warm.
An explorer with unfamiliar insights and uncharted anecdotes,
a composer of ballads, an inventor of art and poetry,
humbly eliciting beauty,
modestly emanating ingenuity.
A relic, a treasure, a lion tamer, a bee charmer.
A lover of the rarest form.

Not without imperfections, of course,
but who isn’t?

I do not care for furs or silks,
ruby slippers or parlor tricks,
just oil paint and turpentine,
velvet and veins,
our fingers interlaced,
my body folding perfectly into his.

I see his smoky silhouette
spindling from the tip of my cigarette,
He is luminous,
and my eyes light up brilliantly like chandeliers.
He has half-moons under his nails.
He grips my neck,
my cheeks are as red as his lips.

And he thinks I’m beautiful.