i'm only interested from where you were small, you bruising that stupid smile, pulling sap from the trees, perhaps in the violence, you couldn't sit still on the throne, that now, you'd cast down terrible ugly kindness. i could never reach you with these arms, paragraphs slurring through the pulses, bookends and brave eyes and everything awkward i believed in. but i never turn off the night light, and i never empty the lake, where we melted into candy and bent corner shops, after we crashed our bikes, and stole away faster than the sun, as the sounds all came down, the night we now know to be forever, i'm still inable, in drying rooms, you never look alive, in your photographs.