It’s like this: “we need to talk” isn’t enough because talk is all we do. I’ve got to turn it inwards, admit that “this day is wrong”, that “I haven’t slept in weeks”, that “I wish I was still a poet” and that’s enough to whet your appetite because you’re good at suspicion and sympathy.

Suspicion, because who has ever loved you and gone on to mean it? Who has ever promised you anything and never dropped it? Never faked it.

And sympathy because we were born under the same leaf buds, you and me, we are from the same knotty roots, and if you cut through them they’d bleed ethanol.

Hands and feet and red-raw knees, we are all we have of each other and of anyone else and if my words don’t work for you, they don’t work at all. I will stutter, and stall, and run away from anything I knew about myself and it gets to the point that I can’t look myself in the eye, have to do my makeup in tiny mirrors so I don’t see the whole of it, the whole horrible whore truth of this face and these eyes and these lips and that lost look that lives somewhere under my skin, spells itself out in goosebumps.