His kisses taste like gun-powder, like war-torn speeches in cramped rooms, like whispers of solidarity on darkened streets at midnight. When he sighs, embers erupt from his tongue.
He wraps his elegant, long fingers in your hair but there is blood beneath his fingernails no matter how he washes his hands (and he washes them often).
When he lies beside you in the darkness, his long, cool body against yours, he is brought to earth, and he is able to be touched. You can melt into him, this boy whose heart has long since corroded, eaten away from sulphur fumes, but you can still hear it, patient in his chest. You touch him and you marvel that he does not burn you, but that is not when you like him best.
He strides forward like a reckoning. In his words, the cracked, holy voice of a revolutionary, is the swelling staccato of shots being fired into a crowd, the raw, unstoppable anger that pours from his frame, tears from his chest like the roar of a lion. He is not soft and he is not safe, rebellion sitting upon his shoulders like a red coat as he talks of freedom and armageddon, indifferent in the latter.
He calls and they answer.
He shines like the sun.
He is a sunflower in a field of ashes. He is bloody and unbowed. Smoke rattles from his lungs and heralds fire, he is burning but he is cold, he is removed as a distant star and faltering warm as a winter sun, but he is beautiful when he smiles.
You hold his hand and he startles as if you offered him the world upon a plate. He has never wanted the world. He has never wanted anything but to be more or less than what he is, which is a hurricane in human skin, but his hands are human hands, and you trace their scars and feel their calluses against your lips.
He tells you that he is incidental. He is every high-blown casualty cited in the news. He is collateral damage. He is innocent as a child playing soldier, because there is nothing in him yet that will change, that will make him see that when he calls upon the people that final time, that the streets will be silent.
When he knows, it will not stop him.
You will find him one day, this boy who is a revolution, and you will think as you lift him, how much red suits him, and how heavy it is to carry him home.