—TO BE COMPLETELY HONEST, I THINK I KNOW HOW IT ENDS

                                                             

                                           Nothing But Thieves

You ball me in yarn, then wash the gauze off my dingy marrow, which is how I know you care. You hold me on the pad of your tongue like a lozenge. Let me melt and drip. Dissolve and reform. In the cold, your teeth stand up straight and salute the frozen moments respectfully, without rancor or sarcasm. Life becomes our perfect serration, a web of intricacies.  Each of our secrets unspools like old-fashioned lamplight, tossed-off scrims and shadow puppets that dance in the corn rows with other prophetic scarecrows. Months float by and still you keep our moat bloated, water lapping each lovable brim. Others often interfere with the breaths we take, even the shallow ones, yet you brocade your lungs to better hear my thrum. It’s fetishistic, how your old scars purr when I nudge them with my nose while your regrets gleam like faience. And your bones--the way they speak, it thrills me to ashes. If there is ever any doubt, you bathe my toes in green tea, feed me the jasmine rice your hair no longer needs. After all, there’s pudding in your navel, a rubber ladle in my left ear. Every day it’s enough just to watercolor breakfast or construct a new nook in your throat. Our language is like that, coded and incorrigible, a blur of windswept starlings. Tonight, before we sleep, I will pull the blankets snug where we lay in a space outside of what everyone thinks they know about us. I will turn and turn and turn, but even that won’t be enough.