Curl your fingers and peel me back and close your arms around me.
 

Will you hold my hand until I’m sure you’re there? Sit by me, languorous with the rich shadow spilling over you and creeping around like a padded paw. 

There is a sense that as you shiver into air, tremble and feel ground reverberating and shadow usurping the spaces your body leaves,  

the sense that as you shiver into air this world takes it and swallows. Will the moon then fall over you, flicker, be the last to go? In its jaw the muscles of the night are packed tense, forcing you into the murk. You ring into my stomach more than my head.  

A Gardenia and one Poppy talking out there, but the silver of their faces only lasts moments, stunning and timorous and now lost to feline lone, grumbles of the earth. Lose Gardenia and her wiles now, and just sit there and  

bathe, burgeon and drink, and I’ll watch you until the moon subsides. And as the pitch rises and your wrists fold over faintly like paper forced in,  

Poppy bends like rubber over the garden, Pandora keels forth in a flash of smoke and the grip of a great leathery paperbark has the forest looming ninefold over us, right behind us. Hold my hand until you can’t decide.  

Feel us atrophy, and the endless tree tremble, arrhythmic with branches wheezing and twisting dull covers over its copper patchwork. Tapestry erodes and its scraps cage us like silt, halt us and hold us and get ever-so-warm, but 

the moment is involuntary, and meaningless now! As those hunched around us call us louder, Gardenia and Peripeteia and your own two hands call us louder, still together we cannot fall back, and it subsumes us in a cloud. Still, will you 

hold my liver with open palms? Tissue-skin and those soft parts work. 

Spiralling and slowly uncoiling and you ache to look up, to imagine the moon whose eyes never close. Whose chops creep around our scalps, whose dregs of saliva threaten to grace us, whose chest we enter hands-first.  

Wrung out, untied, flowers crushed and aromatic underfoot. Feeling it now is unmooring… 

Your life as an island begins to storms and pulsing moonlight. Which falls, fills the shadow, bares the tapestry’s paper-flakiness and the hand you reach to it. 

Closer to it, now, you realise our picture,  

ultimatum and flaw, the last to swallow your likeness, 

lies somewhere in the parts you touch.  

Will you cast and dissolve me with your open palm?  

You hold here nearer than I will ever be.