Love Notes in the Age of Empire

Woke up to your mouth on my collarbone,

teeth first, then tongue—
You taste like salt and sleep and something feral.
With coffee burning in the other room.
My body still remembering the night,
still open, still hungry.
I am whole. obscenely, impossibly whole.
Then I check my phone.

Trump's declaring war on Iran.
And your hand is still between my thighs.
The ticker says missiles.
I come again, slow and deliberate,
Watching the news crawl across the screen,
My body arching into your palm
While children learn the sound of sirens.

This is freedom:
Your teeth marks on my shoulder,
blood rushing to the surface,
blooming purple while Tehran prepares its dead.
I want you again.
I want you more than I want to be good.
I want your weight on me, your breath in my ear,
The animal simplicity of skin on skin
while the empire sharpens its machinery.

The body is a traitor.
It wants pleasure even in the death camps.
It wants to touch even as the tanks roll.
It doesn't care about your politics,
your guilt, your carefully curated rage—
It just wants to be devoured.
And I let it.

You write me love notes with your tongue
(The drones write coordinates.)
You make me breakfast, butter melting into toast.
(They make rubble of hospitals.)
You hold me like I'm precious, like I matter.
(They hold children in cages and call it border security.)
I have never been this free.
I have never been this complicit.

Somewhere, a Romani woman is being evicted,
Her children are watching as the bailiffs come.
And I come watching you watch me
And I think about her children's faces
And it doesn't stop me.
Nothing stops me.

Somewhere, an Iranian mother counts her sons,
Wonders which one the draft will take.
I lose count of how many times you unmake me.
I lose count on purpose.
Somewhere, a Palestinian girl writes poetry in the rubble.
I write this in clean sheets that smell like Black Opium
And I know what that means
And I do it anyway.

They don't get your hands on their body.
They don't get to wake up soft and wanted.
They don't get this sick luxury of being touched
Like their life has value.
They get the war.
I get you.
I get your heat and your coffee and your careful love.
I get to be whole while they are shattered.

And here's the thing no one tells you:
I take it anyway.
not because I've earned it.
not because I deserve it.
but because the body wants what it wants,
and refusing joy won't stop the bombs,
won't empty the camps,
won't bring back the dead.

Maybe that's a lie I tell myself.
Maybe refusing joy is the only honest thing left.
Maybe I'm just weak and calling it politics.
I don't know.
I don't know, and I'm doing it anyway.
So I let you take me like the world isn't ending.
I let myself feel it—every thrust, every gasp,
every moment of forgetting.

I let myself be monstrous with wanting.
This is the trap and i walk into it willingly:
to be loved just enough to go quiet,
satisfied just enough to stay comfortable,
free just enough to forget
that my freedom is built on someone else's grave.

But I won't forget.
i'll carry this:
the weight of your body on mine,
the weight of their bodies in mass graves,
the weight of knowing every moment of pleasure
is bought with someone else's breath.
I'll carry it to the next protest event
where only thirty people will show up

And I'll wonder if any of this matters.
I'll carry it when I write about fascism
for an audience that thinks sharing an article is resistance.
I'll carry it until I do something with it
or until i give up entirely.
i don't know which comes first.

But today?
Today I let you inside me.
Today I let myself luxuriate in it—
the heat, the friction, the mindless animal pleasure
of being alive in a body that works,
that wants, that takes.

Today I think about giving up.
today i think maybe staying in bed forever
is the only honest response to empire.
today i think maybe all of this—
the organising, the writing, the fighting—
is just performance to make the pleasure feel earned.

Today I am guilty and greedy and glad and broken.
The fascists are winning.
The camps are filling.
The war machine is hungry.
And I am here, legs spread,
shuddering hard enough to forget my name,
remembering it just in time
to know what I'm doing is monstrous.

I won't apologise.
I won't pretend this doesn't feel good.
I won't perform guilt to make you comfortable.
But I also won't pretend I know how to turn this into a revolution.
This is what it looks like:
to be free under fascism.
to be loved while the world burns.
to choose pleasure and politics both,
to refuse the false choice between joy and justice—
or to tell yourself that's what you're doing
while you stay in bed.

They want us dead or docile.
But I choose feral.
I choose this ugly, complicated, blood-soaked joy.
The empire will fall.
but not before breakfast
Your mouth on my neck.
The news on mute.
My hand is reaching for you again.
Tehran burning.

I can't look away from either.