how does it fare,

your incendiary clasp on my wrist after hours of resting on a teacup? you mention that language is but a mere sensation but

how so exactly? my ass cheeks are stiff from straddling the limestone aqueduct replica for what feels like forever. i haven’t seen you in what feels like forever, and i don’t think i see you

as we speak – or, at least you do. precisely, the contours of what seem like nose eyes and mouth keep shifting, bathed in rays that emanate from large lightbulbs, with a sense of direction but no points to pin-point, a screensaver

of eternally generating pipelines only seemingly randomized to fill up the void but governed by rows of ones and exes and ohs. forever

is a word we’d say often. forever’s what floated above the minutia of fresh bread and churchgoing in the bomb-kissed cataracts of our hometown. you’ll be here forever, a fourteen-year-old honest-to-god conviction but also a battered-down phrase turned curse turned life sentence. forever’s a guarantee of what came

to go. the promises held, the missives of habits, fixations we held without touching each other in ways that we wanted to

be touched. i haven’t seen you since then and you’ve grown buff and muscular, your kaleidoscope face perched upon shoulders too broad to embrace, lacking proportion and grace of a memory murmured through fresh pillowcases into memory foam every night since. your long fingers i once ago sucked semi-jokingly

rest as firm on your lap as my slightly dormant erection under the table top. i never believed a tongue’s a sensation and i don’t think you’d either. if so, would you speak now

in sheer understatements, sat feet apart across me too formal, legs spread and chest propped in a false stance of dominance? your daughter’s asleep in the pram and i keep wondering if she’d comprehend love

as we knew it – taciturn, sneaked-in, never showed-off, paused when your brother twists keys of the flat, paused when a group of children walk past, paused upon hearing the echoing clack of a nun’s

mary janes down the nave, a sacrosanct alleyway love. you don’t have to speak just

be touched. it’s you and me, and the minutia, the lingering afternoon lights.