The hugs arrive now with a chill, a thermal debt,
Not from the body you were, but the ghost I beget.
In the REM-stained laboratory of my head,
I clone you nightly from the echoes in my bed.
The first were warm with the ATP’s bright burn,
A feverish graft my senses wouldn’t unlearn.
But memory’s a faulty, cooling replication,
A slow degradation of a once-warm sensation.
Each dream is a petri dish where the old heat dies,
I watch the lovely, lukewarm bacteria of your eyes
Divide and drift toward some cryophilic state,
Adapting to the cold of their postponed-by-fate.
My arms recall a homeothermic bliss, a steady core,
But now they close on a poikilothermic lore---
A creature matching the temperature of its environment,
And my grief is a tundra, vast and permanently sent.
The enzyme of your touch, specific as a key,
Catalyzes nothing now; the substrate is just me,
A reaction slowing down, the activation energy too high,
A thermodynamics of longing, where all warm things must die.
This ache has a half-life that seems to only grow,
A radioactive isotope with a permafrost glow.
The hugs keep coming from this cryogenic past,
A Linnaean type specimen---the first, the last.
So perfectly preserved in the museum of my sleep,
Taxidermied affection, so terribly cheap,
A mounted butterfly of an embrace, pinned to my chest,
Its vivid, dusty scales going colder than the rest.
May 4
May 4, 2026 at 1:29 PM UTC
The hugs arrive now with a chill, a thermal debt,
Not from the body you were, but the ghost I beget.
In the REM-stained laboratory of my head,
I clone you nightly from the echoes in my bed.
The first were warm with the ATP’s bright burn,
A feverish graft my senses wouldn’t unlearn.
But memory’s a faulty, cooling replication,
A slow degradation of a once-warm sensation.
Each dream is a petri dish where the old heat dies,
I watch the lovely, lukewarm bacteria of your eyes
Divide and drift toward some cryophilic state,
Adapting to the cold of their postponed-by-fate.
My arms recall a homeothermic bliss, a steady core,
But now they close on a poikilothermic lore---
A creature matching the temperature of its environment,
And my grief is a tundra, vast and permanently sent.
The enzyme of your touch, specific as a key,
Catalyzes nothing now; the substrate is just me,
A reaction slowing down, the activation energy too high,
A thermodynamics of longing, where all warm things must die.
This ache has a half-life that seems to only grow,
A radioactive isotope with a permafrost glow.
The hugs keep coming from this cryogenic past,
A Linnaean type specimen---the first, the last.
So perfectly preserved in the museum of my sleep,
Taxidermied affection, so terribly cheap,
A mounted butterfly of an embrace, pinned to my chest,
Its vivid, dusty scales going colder than the rest.
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