sometimes, running

I've developed a habit of running my mouth. Trilling my tongue over teeth—white keys, black keys, you know, the pockholes between milk teeth—aiming to dash to the other side, my stature a tad too young for this. Thumb and pinky over the line zippered up my sternum, trying to bridge this canyon. Because no matter what you say, I have to make this jump.

You could, idealistically, trail that zipper down—why don't you? But be gentle, mind those nippers, your teeth against teeth, biting the link—pearly whites, again we are running, racing against steel gray—and there you tug, till the fabric unravels, spooling as a heap of silk. Go ahead, then, reach inside, rifle around, dig through the drawers. Pass your palm around the walls. Close your hand around anything substantial, give it a squeeze with your index, middle, and thumb. I won't react.

And you might say, There's nothing here. Squeeze. Where your heart once lay is a scientific replica, a perfectly feigned reaction. Where agony once spindled across as veins has been filled as golden cracks in lucent porcelain. 

And that's the truth, no? Fundamentally, you have been built wrong. You're missing something, your core lacking, your skin shallow, your soul chipped. The attention that governs your strata of functions, it's a far too complicated system to parse; I could trail after you, keep to you, tend and tether—let your head fade, the fear run blithely hot, and still, you wouldn't give me an answer: love or limerence, obsession or trust? Loving on parallel lines, never perpendicular, these relations grown homemade in poor taste; all your bits and bobs, clumping together a machine whose operations tick behind the layman, a beat off the person beside you. 

You admire love, you admire persistence, but the gears of which this racepath runs winds up becoming a strung accord of fitting neurosis.

Squeeze. Dashing, really. The way your flesh would part. I am not a lover. You'll be fine if I sink lower, deeper, undo the buttons on your throat, stick this arm inside till we hit bone—squeezing for life, searching for your reading on love, love, don't you daydream of it all, find it banal. Where's the reciprocation? The give and take of it all. And what comes is not the scream of contentment, of satisfaction, an endorphin cascade, but a sound of violence, an act of cold, unpleasant limpidity, a limb cleaved that mankind so easily extends. Dreamed of this, but the reality is joyless; promised this, but you don't take pride in it. A hole where love lay. Heart stolen. Or never there, in the first place. 

Don't tell a lie, or at least, tell enough to delay the truth. You can't outrun karma. The death knell of your wedding bells. Joyless. Or not really, I'd hope, holding your hand. Just separate wayward travelers, perpetually adjacent to the roads trodden toward happiness—perpendicular to me but parallel to you. And maybe, you know, as you lift my veil, your heart still cold and your body still frigid, you can consider this as fate. You will promise me on the altar, you selfish heartless thing—with an appetite for the tragic and the palate for the bitter—to love me in a way that matters… At least, I think I would. 

~ AUG 2026