Show me everything.
For weeks I've been trying to get the words across my lips,
trying to break your clenched-teeth silence,
the stillness in us, orbiting in astral planes -
but I do try, standing in empty stairwells,
open doors and vacant rooms. If you try, I do not know.

Show me everything.
Show me that scar below your navel where they cut you open,
laid to rest these hands that take their own turn cutting. Where breathing is machinery and living is a mess of tangled lines, where stealing away is not permitted for god help us if it makes anyone feel bad. So me and you carry the pain instead.

Show me everything -
a future I can hold protected, a light in the window across the street while I stand, in darkness, surrounded by expensive plastic things. Sometimes, for a fraction of time, I see that light in your eyes, a whisper of something tiny and sacred. A promise with a living, beating heart. I try to speak, but no words will come, and when they do, time has passed us by again, alone in a stairwell, in a dark supply room, in a room of machinery and robotic breaths.

Have a good shift, then.