you said: you know, i can't remember
if you ever told me we were doomed from
the beginning.

but it sounds like something you would say.

but when you find yourself experimenting in
my skin, i will feel obliged to mention the pulse
that pulls my strings, the fact that i am not
your personal puzzle, but something foreign and
frail and not even worth your exasperated sighs.

i am button eyes and uneven stitches and i
said: please shut the door behind you when
you leave,

and you did not catch the inflection in my tired
flatblack eyes, the weary thread of my shaking
mouth, the "when" instead of "if".

you said: this has to stop.

and i had to remind you that i am just less.  

and i felt your cheshire eyes on my sutured back,
prickly with what should have been ancient
history, but when you traced my seams with your
cold fingertips it was yesterday,it was now,now.

and the raconteurs of our age wrote you letters
heavy with ink and implications, fears accrued over
years like the metaphors in my gut, the similes
skipping through my twisted genes

and you
stopped.

you said:

i hated the parasite growing in my womb, hoped it
had nightmares but fed it on my knees, prayed for
its destruction but nourished my hungry cancer while
it tore the meat from my bones,

because it was something you'd given me and i
said: this is what i want, everything i want,

and added the negatives silently.  you didn't
wait for the elevator and i hung myself on a tangent
in preparation for the war that would bring me peace,
at last and i said: i am the tumour and the destroyer but
you drew the iron alloys through my lungs, lovingly
trailed this interrupted symbolism between my ribs and

i said: i am everything less beautiful than two hundred
and six frighteningly fragile human pieces and i
am running and running and running

out of breath and i said, i said: i never told you that, but i'll
say it now and you

are tossing me down the stairwell and forgetting how
to run at all and i
said and you

stopped
and i

said: i have never seen you from
this perspective

and you said: