Craving

I crave your mouth, your voice, your hair.
Silent and starving, I prowl through the streets.
Bread does not nourish me, dawn disrupts me, all day
I hunt for the liquid measure of your steps.

I hunger for your sleek laugh,
your hands the color of a savage harvest,
hunger for the pale stones of your fingernails,
I want to eat your skin like a whole almond.

I want to eat the sunbeam flaring in your lovely body,
the sovereign nose of your arrogant face,
I want to eat the fleeting shade of your lashes,

and I pace around hungry, sniffing the twilight,
hunting for you, for your hot heart,
like a puma in the barrens of Quitratue.

--Sonnet XI, from Cien sonnets de amor by Pablo Neruda
translated by Stephen Tapscott

I like this poem, other than the word "arrogant," which comes directly from the Spanish, "del arrogante rostro," but which seems wrong, in English.

This is Gaston Lachaise's "Standing Woman (Heroic Woman)" 1932. I don't know the less heroic woman beneath her.

The Buddhist notion is that craving is one of the main sources of suffering; I disagree. You know you're alive if you're craving. Numbness is much worse. k. d. lang's one massive hit, if you want more of it.