it feels like hearing fingertips

try to retrace your memories: dna strands, the perfect dance, the shiver-smile, cold hair, and those eyes.

(his dark pearl, and insecticide, perhaps velvet, in skirmish.)

try to regather your structure: close your breathing, both parenthesis and paralysis, and the slight tether of repair.

try to remember your days: she will rise before you as a story, chewing on her lip, an apple, a war that does not just go into the sea.

try to hold as much as you can.

(more than those skies that burn with the night.)

try to keep her when photographs lose their stomachs, and words shed as brittle, and only limp arch.

try to renew.

try to renew.

try to renew, and sometimes you will.

(we must record only a truth, and stumble around it.)

and the truth—does it still need a defense? we feel the world strike us through, and put as much life into the pain to follow, and hang these along the darkness, and in that scant light, that the ribbons patch upon your hands.