In the same room, On the same bed.
Her murmurs are an archipelago:
drifting slabs, distorted feeling, inconsolables,
flotsam floating erratically in an oceanic maelstrom:
location? physiognomy? Impossible to delineate,
subject to preemptive rejection, to analysis as frenzy,
an edge-me-up out of deep sleep
to echoes of that box-been-opened, to a mountain cacophony.
It’s like the water-whirl in a flushing toilet,
like acids poured, a disrupted synapse, the isolation of nerve,
and eating, eating away at one’s senses like a masochistic cannibal,
pathology impervious, disease ineradicable,
like small, undetected, but devastating masses of fungi
spread across one’s already seamed plateaus of consciousness.
For in alteration there is no alternative
but sit watch wait try to understand the phenomenon,
as if it were a coat that’s not yours but you are modeling.
Who is the remover then? To turn away is the worst disdain.
After a bit, the best you can do is return the complement.