I stand where my edges touch the other, a lip of flesh at the brink of unself. What is mine dissolves in a closeness that burns cold, a nearness no step can cross, a threshold that opens by swallowing. I give myself to what refuses ownership and feel a second pulse blooming under my ribs, the stranger living through my teeth. Heavier than the end, the weight of an ending grows inside the beginning, a tremor of water shaking the bones of light. I become more of the thing I am afraid to speak of. Let the border sing. Let the border bite.

Through intervals of love, disgust, and disdain we call it rest, the pause between faces, two corpses learning to borrow one name, one stench. The pleasure was this: to step outside each other, to keep two lives smoldering in the bottomless void, to feel the last day coil inside the first embrace. A clock is buried beneath the tongue and every touch carries its funeral, soft bells ringing in the marrow. Heavier than the end.

Insurmountable, uncrossable closeness, excessively near. The room tilts like a drowned cathedral and breath learns the shape of surrender, kneeling to the nameless within, to voiceless languages, to the blade that opens my guts like a door to the ultimate bliss.