Your hand cascades up and down your throatline, and I feel your presence across the room and the statelines become irrelevant.

I feel you bubble like a liquid inside and outside of what I can consume.

Eyes burn when I close them, and the redish black shapes dance underneath my eyelids (street lights)

lamps

Air on this part of my skin teases me, and the thought of you makes me lighter until I gasp,
I need something to keep me on the floor.

I don't like being high above the city.

How many times have I told you, to give me music that has only a few notes and doesn't

erupt my thoughts with your thoughts,

you consume me, playing at carefree flutters of lightness but I've read your words through the language and tongues of others with the same bodies stuck in a life made for smiling.

I know you are on display for epochs and stripping down so the shadows cast light on your body, sway. "See? I have shadows." You need them to be observed.

The wood is smooth from the times you have spun around it to the music that they make you perform to.

I know the
ways you drown.

Yet, you beg me to lay with you in the sun, pretending the problem is the way the sun caresses your shoulder blades, lashing out and pinning your breastbone to the ground. "I am on the ground." We convince each other. Touch.

I can't stop watching you dance, and the other patrons have returned to flea-infested investments and the angry wails of tired wives with tired mouths. It is time to go, but you pull the chair up to the sun, and touch the same smooth surface, winding your body, casting shadows and begging me to suffer synesthesia. You perform, and the sounds that you have composed fill the room and I find myself drifting up over us, not able to hear your composition without my skin and flesh shaking in anticipation and confusion. You pin me to my own body but I cannot stay put, I am not able, you have filled every shiver with music, and my body never had a chance.

Twisting the knife

Twisting the knife, they say. We all nod, understanding. Obviously. We have had had knives twisted in our own guts, and so therefore ultimately can relate to this apparently quite common human experience.

You had almost gotten used to the way the blade brushes up uncomfortably against spleens and gall bladders and then the pancreas. The sputter of blood that erupts from your lungs and then your stomach, the rancid bitter taste of bile eating away at your gums feels like a neighbor that always seems to watch just a little too closely.

Eroding. The blade, sitting there, rusting and melding into the slender rib bones constructed of cement and rusting away, rusting away and thickening the protection that made up the things that supported and housed your organs.

You lived for such a long time, you thought to yourself. How does one live so long with such an injury? You have lived such awhile, and the shards have broken off of the blade and invaded your bloodstream. It hurts, and you cannot move without the sharpness biting into you, stabbing muscles and tendons, lodging themselves into veins and ultimately in the small fine tissues of your lungs. You've become accustomed to watching the way you breathe in and out and hoping this time blood doesn't drown you as you breathe; hoping this time the shards won't pierce an organ you thought was safe. Always you spit up the blood, and taste the metal, and your eyes turn red. Always, you wipe it away with the back of your hand and the underside of your favorite chair is now stained from wiping away the evidence of your body's breaking.

So long, you have formed a thick ropy scar tissue around and around the blade. Spongy and thick, it secures the blade in place, and only makes tears when you try to move. But if you do not move, and you stay completely still, the blade cannot do extra damage and is almost cordial in its attack. "I am still attacking you, you know" it mocks. But politely. With a handshake, and a head nod.

Twisting the blade is damaging the damaged, ripping the scars out in chunks, forcing raw beaten flesh to yet again reconstruct itself. New pain, bursting dying cells and gushing of liquified putrid skin and muscles, tendons splayed and shredded. Broken bone bits and snapped ribs, and a new wave of rusted metal shards rushing through the body. Agony is understated, and your heart faithfully beats wondering if it is assassinating itself, and you see little point in such savagery.