7

(Transcription of top: You bought me in a dream--that dream I had with the white-walled room that opened out into a cave at the end of the world. Only skin jackets wrapped around our blood shielded us from the meteors that crashed into the ceiling, popped in the lava like sugar on a tongue and I thought if we were younger, we would have tried to taste it. I crossed the meteors with bare heels, careful not to touch those lava spaces like a checkerboard, playing that game every child knows about couches and carpet--keep on the cushions; the floor'll burn you, swallow your body down. I peeled off a piece of the meteor like a string of black taffy, laughed as I snapped it on my wrist as a bracelet; it schooled itself in square links, apocalypse bending itself into geometry, easy. A piece of the end of the world circled my pulse, and I felt your fly-paper breath heavy on my neck, sticking to my legs, and I screamed. Shackled by my end-mark, I had no price, I had no weight, but you thought you could breathe me into your body, pay for me with the wonder-blood rushing behind your eyes, but I danced across your senses, careful not to touch your white-hot heart, kept my feet free from your lava that wanted to swallow what I was and tuck me into a doom, a date, like men who mark the rapture on their calendars, owning holiness with numbers. But we are all numbers, I said, all numbers and patterns, and you can't own my numbers by shouting out your own.)