everything we discard looks nervous
in quotation marks
I wanted to touch
the collage of your lips to read down
each overlap by accident

you've mapped yourself
the works turned from their treachery
I borrowed against

let's say and then be something else:
any number of encores, the faithful
next free every evening are all
so eloquent

but once

a trickle of blood broke over your skin
and I tasted nothing, felt nothing
see and saw nothing
into a rival for it

the way you love both rings loudest
long enough to startle brackets
to bracket what was
immune now, surplus

almost the entire recovery
from surging day to day studies
if you resisted, where you were
likeliest

I can only mouth the debt forward
punctuated
by a scale of grass blade to body
body to restless


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