ONE (LIKE YOU ARE DOING NOW)

The longer I lie here the more my skin will wrinkle.

And you are standing over me. Reminds me of that time, when you stood, much like this, as you are now, over me, towering above and examining my length stretched out before you. I was napping, on a couch, moldy and infested with undetectable parasites, napping and dreaming and you stood over me much like you do now and I had no idea. Watched me sleep and wanted me to wake so you could stare into my eyes much like you are doing now and startle the dream from me, but also wanted it to continue because dreaming and unmoving I was peaceful stretched out full. You wanted to grab my arms and pin them still much like you are doing now so the image would be more perfect, indelible, but you did not, you watched me dream and eventually got bored and eventually moved away.

You watch the water unmoved crease my skin, curl it on itself and marvel that a thing so still can have such reaction. But it is the still things that hold the most power. That are the most deadly.
TWO (MATHEMATICIANS)

I am lying and the water won’t stop agitating and the water is like the beach, how they all say, all the strange mathematicians of the world all say that the number of grains of sand on all the beaches in the all world are infinite and they say this all despite the fact that the world is only a specific amount of surface and a specific amount of weight sand is a specific thing taking a specific space. And the problem comes down to the fact that mathematicians as a sort are quite very lazy. If they were to count them, all the grains of sand they would have to all kneel, in very long lines, there on the beaches of all the world, picking each grain and counting it and passing it back to a mathematician behind who would count also and pass back to a mathematician to verify the count. The work would be painstaking and exact and with every second spent kneeling on the beaches of all counting and passing and counting this number of grains, a number of rocks would be dashed apart by another number of rocks and themselves turned into grains of sand that the mathematicians would then also have to count. And so the mathematicians all of the world decided that there an infinite number of grains and if you’d rather, feel free to prove them wrong, but you, it would seem, are content instead to thrust your fingers into my shoulders, and see how far into my shoulders you can push and how far down into the bathtub you can then push me.
THREE (LIKE A DISCOTHEQUE)

This penetrates my head with the water, forceful and sudden and I forget to breathe and to close my eyes and the world underneath desperate and mutated and is those warm Spanish boys. It is that drunk dusk and you wondering what the color of dusk is because it doesn’t seem to be amber but that is the only color that you can think to call it and I think that maybe dusk is one of the colors that we forget every day at this exact time, that further we are robbed of all the colors of the world for those few brief moments so that we can be awed to witness something as the sunset that follows immediately and isn’t it a shame then to forget the sunset having lost to the dusk and would we ever get the color back and what sort of a terrible fate and you remind me that in the city where we live we never see the sunset unless it is down eighteenth street because we are lucky, but we always catch the dusk and do we then have no color the either of us and before we can fight those boys come up there and asked if we wanted to go to the discotheque and they blink at us and make us feel strange and beautiful and I wonder aloud if they still call them discotheques and you say that they do because of where we are but I can’t remember if we are on an island somewhere in the Mediterranean or stuck, magically in the nineteen seventies.
FOUR (AT TEN)

I can see the creases in my skin drawing themselves as canals along my fingers and down to where I sliced my hand so terribly that I ran ten-years-old up the hill, the slow loud wail trailing out behind me. Cut it on a piece of tossed metal which cleaved my palm surely and deftly and it was like it had been set in the dirt deliberate. And I ran and cried and screamed but still held the ruined palm above my head like I had been told, and the blood ripped out of the gash which covered completely my lifeline, ending it or rewriting it, as you are doing now, and I ran, the blood, like birthday streamers behind me and dotted the neighbor’s grass and to the house and rushed to the hospital and fainted into a fog and remember nothing past stitch number five and now the water has creased my skin so that I can’t find that scar, can’t prove it happened and I hope that you trust that it did. The creases of my fingers are all join together, to become a single fold that arcs along my body entire so that you could, if you wanted, curl me up along it, if you wanted to compress me down into a smaller, neater more portable version, something if you wanted to you could carry in your pocket that you could pull out whenever. And from here, beneath I think, last, you look as pretty as when you sleep.