So now my skin’s an echo, an alter ego, tapping drum beats,
attempting to communicate, a kind of clone, another failure for the record.
As though I have a scrambler inside of me
when we are close to each other, as now, as even now,
I am afraid to speak, or even
to open my mouth. I think, “The electricity
from my tongue will shoot outwards
with such force that it will shock you
into leaving me, that I shall be left
with my senses in even greater disarray,
such that I, even to myself, will be unrecognizable.
And all that will be instantaneous.
In your absence, I imagine,
I shall whisper
every deliberately dark insult that I am aware of,
and at each mirrored encounter,
shatter all of its photonic reflections
into the sharpest deepest-cutting
knives in my vocabulary