Put a drink in my mouth and stop my heart. Put a fire in my hands and watch my eyes roll. These limbs are nothing but, these limbs are piling each other in the race to rapture. Ply my teeth with honey, unhook the bra straps of my aching jaw, let memory slip out of socket. You condemned your neighbor to a year of weekends, and watched his hair fall through his lips. But baby I look in those eyes and I hear a dial tone, and that sound fits better on my hip than any man’s voice I’ve heard yet, I know it.

These recent days are lived in fear for my faculties. Now, now I know that not only will, with time, my hearing’s fading, tinny with the sound of cricket’s wings, follow me to the end in dusty remembrances of a time when I thought I knew what it meant to hear a word, not only this, but my sanity’s ghost hovers over my shaking body to come. Because our blood is our blood, and our thoughts rise up from it like steam. Because I am sealed with you in this, the keening sound of our youth’s passing.