Your monthly dose of disgrace

Vines on vines

You’ve yellowed since I saw you last.
Shrivelled and shrunken,
curled inward like heated paper,
the same tea-black shade.
You’re sour and shamed.
I can’t pretend
to understand what you pretend or why,
or tell when your laugh
is genuine and rising as opposed to pebble-water cold.
These things are codes
which I cannot consciously unravel.
I can merely twine myself
around you,
vines on vines,
choking out life with our hands clasped
tight in borrowed understanding.

I can tell when your heart’s up,
your heat’s up, your skin’s
pricked with sweat even if I never knew
the marks drawn dark across your
yellow-paper spine.
There’s an ocean between you.
A cavern of mildewed cold
where the small stones of your laughter tumble,
like the clink of held hands,
togethertogether,
towards the bottom.
Towards the beach in the bay where the sunlight’s stored,
paper-yellow and pebble-cold

where you’re frozen
squinting in the light of something long gone and smiling.
There’s an ocean.
Three feet of cotton and an eight hour night
which you stare at
and pray to
but cannot cross.