they make clocks now that don’t tick
too fast—don’t even have hands.
they slow you down, and drag your feet
by the heels, where Thetis held Achilles.
and they slash through your dreams,
boiling up from a barren pit—the one
deeper than the back of your mind,
behind all the back burners, black
now with pitch and smoking remnants.
i was still going to eat them
but you had none of it. standing
in the white, gravel driveway facing
me and not me with your hands
cocked at your hips
in those acid-washed shorts.
i could have eaten you, then,
but you spoke words in me with your body
and left no thought unpunctuated.
i sensed disappointment in your joints
as you pressed into me, warm
and cold simultaneously.
“there’s no sense in arguing,”
i heard your vertebrae say.
and there wasn’t.
still, in the void between clock ticks—
that old metronome can’t keep me in time—
you were you and not you, and
every powdery face i ever counted
with closed, flickering eyes.
you pressed and my blood grew sentience
because i felt each cell’s thought
like a hivequeen.
and me with you, all my noisy blood
and all your pressing body, unrelenting,
i swept us out of dreamspace
into an ocean of light,
no hydrogen, no oxygen,
—waves lapped and foamed
on sandstone beaches where
that ticking clock is irrelevant
and i can call my own thoughts back,
like reeling in a fishless, baitless hook.
and you say, still pressing me:
“there’s no sense in arguing.”
