forever is what a body is for
I guess the Chicago winter did get to me after all. On never getting over anything.
“Do you think you’re more him or her?” she asks. “Personality-wise.”
“Mostly her,” I say. “Maybe 10% him.”
“I guess that makes sense. You laugh like her.”
I shrug. “Everyone laughs like somebody.”
Behind my ribs a stomach sits
that never learned to eat;
it hoards and hoards the things I was
and keeps them dark and sweet.
All my lives and all my deaths still
swirl within its chest;
fear has hues that blue that scar
that simmer with the rest.
“I’ve moved on, though,” I say. “Like, actually. I’m evolved.”
“Explain.”
“The past is of no importance to the present. That’s it.”
“Very Hume-esque. I thought you hated reading him.”
I laugh.
Sludge shifts inside a body quick
corrupting, rising slow;
I am all that I have been
and all that I do not know.
Those blackened, strangered hallways
all of which I am comprised;
I stand to meet to miss to love
and death burns through my eyes.
“Hmm,” she thinks out loud. “Was that perception or truth?”
“What?”
“Your face. Just now.”
“It’s all perception. Obviously.”
It comes back up sometimes as taste,
a sour, spoiled mud:
my mind and body both resist
things bottled in my blood.
Those gray-green years so long ago
of only one week’s length;
they rot inside me, smearing stains
with all their gray-green strength.
“Okay, what about me?” she says. “Him or her. Pick for me.”
“You already know.”
“I did the whole thing already. I’m done.”
“Okay.”
“It’s done.”
“I believe you.”
“Do you?” she presses.
I pause.
“Yes.”
Now that I lay me down to sleep
my swamp will settle slow.
My ribs that cage, my soul that keeps
her hands, three feet below,
still hold the thing they held and split
all of those years ago.
“What do you wanna do after this?” she asks.
“I don’t know. We can just drive around I guess.”
“Can we get food?”
“Sure.”