artificial warmth

we drink more wine, know that well be out soon, well be down the drain. the creases of your hands suggest wedding rings, suggest sawdust and too much sun and the incessant strumming of guitar strings. your fingers are gutterbound leaves. we are under bridges in car parks, in the underbelly of this something that we swim beneath, pretend to live in. we scale buildings, sketch skyscrapers untill they become us. we are spires of cement. we pretend to love the mist in the morning rising off of cold water, the ice that paints our windows with heiroglyphics. really they just leave us cold and we're all about artificial warmth. you can see it in this smile.

you say you love me but you cut the syllables all wrong, your broken boned, disjointed speech stings my eyelids, turns my knuckles white sometimes.

and i say it, just to scare you,

what if i die? you'll wonder why you spent so much time loving something this temporary when you could have been with something that lived forever.

you stopped painting highways and landscapes and the inside of your mother's hands when you met.

i'm giving you back whatever i took from you.