my joints creak around the letters, reverberating in the atriums of my heart
                                                                                                                                                          crescendoing into the deafening chorus¹ of those who came before and those not yet born
                                                                                                                                            their voices rattle through my ribs and vibrate down my arm, pulsate in the tips of my fingers and finally
                                                                                                                                                       they spill onto the page² in jagged lines that connect us across the unbridgeability of time and violence 
                                                                                                                                                            ink armours | encrusts my fingers and yet it cannot muffle the strike of unheard agony that transcends the confines of paper
               even when the words have dried, they remain, just like our existence, 
                                                                                                                                                             ever in transit³

another has left us today and in their place, another fissure in the mountain of my heart
breathlessly, I search the ache that seeks to fill this cavern, hoping to identify the
catastrophic cacophony of voices echoing across all of time.
doubt is drowned out by the pressure powering the sprinkler in the lawn of my soul and I
write
ever more words to stem this tidal wave that is and isn’t mine,
failing all over to recognize that my omnipresent unheard sisterbrothersiblings won’t be un-
listened to anymore. this is the burden we carry to-
gether, dead alive not-yet-born
hey! hey!
                        hey hey hey! Macho-Machoman!⁴
I’ve got to be a mouthpiece megaphone for us and before I can yell about our
joy, our hurt needs to be heard. It’s the immediacy of this death and the diffuse bone-deep
soreness of
knowing that death is our past present future but so is
love                    ?

mirrors embedded in my skin refract the light that shines on our body
never and always alone, our physical contact transported through time and space
offers increments of relief in the form of chains of
peptides that briefly inhibit our receptors but truthfully, it alleviates nothing and yet, my heart
quickens at the prospect of such profound connection.

release only comes by blood-letting my
soul, piercing it with the nib of my pen and letting it drain onto
the page, destined to be filled with shimmering rivers of
unshed tears manifesting in cosmic dust which settles in the
vacant chambers of my heart
Where have you all gone? Let us build a home with
xenoliths so that we may encompass each other entirely as we have
yearned for, always. In the hope that we may eventually birth the
zygote of a future unseen, unfelt,⁵ unthought, awaited.