the space above my ears.

Trial and Error

I have you under a microscope in the most literal sense there can be.

Examining the creases in your pomegranate lips, twisting the lenses every which way to see what seeds are truly blooming between them.

Picking out every silky filament that makes up your milkweed tongue smashed flat between two thin glass panes.

I am pulling you apart to fix you, you see, memorizing every tendon under your skin, every trading card slotted neatly between your bones.

All I know is that it's a melodious kind of malady, the kind where you're choking and coughing on the flowers blooming in your lungs, up your throat, through and out of your mouth.

It's simplicity in the saddest way, the answer more difficult than the question.

The truth is you can lie, but you'll never learn.

You, I said, the one with the furrowed brows, the misleading glare.

You've lost yourself so much that you see potential, bits of your blood in other people.

You're not scared that you'll run dry, amusingly enough, but you're scared they'll be infected with what you put inside them.

A piece of vacancy.

A great, wide, empty plaza.

The buildings are closing in, going, going...

But they're not, are they? They're standing motionless in the sun as inanimate objects do, rotting slowly, infinitely if you compare it to us;

The flesh vessels.

The cockroaches climbing on top of each other, fighting to reach the victim first.

Imagine it, our mortal bodies navigating the oaths through the throat of the beast.

Swimming through the paths of arteries, the blood tasting much sweeter than the skin.

Counting up the cells that compose you.

White cells, red cells.

Prison cells.

Broken wells.

Fever bells.

Your heart of lead didn't make the cut when they eliminated everything that wasn't carbon-based.

I can't make this shit up.

I couldn't write you like this without feeling guilty.

It's different now because it's real, but I couldn't have seen you in this light,

Volleying between two versions of yourself until mitosis of a greater stage occurs, depth perception now lost on either side.

Desperation sets in at some point, probably somewhere in the third stage.

The doctors test the endurance of your body, your only body, but won't that ail you sooner?

Catalyzing and/or delaying these alien processes you perform so nonchalantly.

The fission of two eyes, two sights, two halves of a whole love.

We're playing god at this point, but I'd like to think we can win.

I'd like to think you haven't given up on yourself yet.