write me down the backs of your hands

we sent you here to suffer. we sent you here to drown in nectar. drink deeply. the winter, they say, is over. we're calm now and there is silence in our hearts. you liar. change your fears. return, retreat. toss through the hot wet days.

the neighbors scream at each other. he stands with a toothbrush in one hand, in the window, and shames her. he stands, with his ridiculous striped boxer briefs and his taut ass, he gesticulates with the brush violently, as though he were stabbing repeatedly a small mound of flesh, similar to a throat. his body is not soft, there is no softness. his hand slams into the door frame, he manaces, he growls. and her sound rises from the interior, where i cannot see. she, the invisible one, supplicates. she voices a thousand drops of condensation across the transparent wall between their bodies, heat radiating from his closed chest and mottled face shakes the drops of moisture, they bleed into one another. she comes just so close, but never closer, and even when she is in his arms her cheek is just sliding down the wet glass that burns up the air between them



"how poor are they that have not patience!
what wound did ever heal but by degrees?
thou know'st we work by wit, and not by witchcraft;
and wit depends on dilatory time."