the two standees have a faceoff and no one wins i lose

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standing at my back is you, your arms snaking round my waist, my chest rising and falling out of time with your heartbeat thumping fiercely on my upper back: morse code message i don't want to translate, because the second i do i will imprint it in braille on my heartline and i'll turn around and dive back into the mangrove of a chest you have split open with your caked fingernails

standing before me isn't a person it's a pillar of- something dissolute; a fog of clayey salt raised from the soil / a cloud of fire yanked stolen from the cosmos tied with a kite string with my tooth on the end of the hook- it- he- just stands before me dripping in droplets of melting snow and his two eyes of coal quietly glow, warm the air before my face. he is tall, like two metres. i put a cap on him- he doesn't begin to dance. the hat is polyester, not silk

woodsy vines imprison me in a lacey net. i am drawn deeper and deeper and the dimple of my back grows into a dent with something alive.

i cannot move.

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