I finish your sentences by
Pulling the words out of your mouth
Lending language to indecision
Lending tongue to unperfected precision
When the others talked about the bad guy in the book
I never used my ears.
Horse blinders on my head on the fissured sidewalk
I finally saw the unfantastical you I was falling into.

I wanted to comb out the phone wires myself
To tell them it was all true
But with my fingers on your sleeping head
I could not bring myself to split time in half
And offer a moment where my digits didn't graze your face.
I could feel you confining me to the margins of a book
You were ready to return
But you bent me over too many times.

The first time we talked about reading
We laughed about how we couldn’t make sense of paperback
Unless we had a pencil.
We were more similar than you thought, no?

I still think about the highlights,
I still remember your lines.