How things work

when you fall in love with someone if you are

young enough what happens is you show that person all the

things about you that are young and those things are beautiful

and hopeful and strong but also terrible and ugly and perhaps

to some extent not your own and later on that person has to live

knowing you are still not all you hoped you would be

and they carry this knowledge with them as if it were

a string of similar but unsolved murders

the promise of what you could have been is dead bodies

dead bodies littering a patch of rough skin on my thumb

appearing there as if as a sign and I look at the bodies

(which are the same as the rough skin) and wonder

where did they come from what do they mean

and the skin flaking off over two days and then on the third day

I recall assembling garden furniture with a

ratcheting spanner that had sharp edges and how the thumb

felt it might form a blister or a bruise but instead

they have gone from my inner skin to my outer

and now I have a measure for how long that process takes

how much time to go from inside of me to just flaking off

and how much other skin I must have sloughed

from every other place since so this is what the body does

dies a little each day and then the parts of us that are left

just keep going