we are all in the same state of vulnerability when we sleep, as anyone else, and i bet that's why we all got together all those thousands of years ago, to not be scared when we sleep

can you imagine having a house with so much warmth and brown and wood and little things in it, kitschy and beautiful. paisley print and filligree. and you paint fruits and flowers on walls and paste up paper printed with wild animals and roll out thick rugs that your feet sink inches into, the edges rolled gold and the innards designed with leaves. and you live there forever and use the same chippedish dishes forever and the same blankets and embroidered pillowcases forever and you know every step on the staircase that squeaks and every nook where the spiders like to cob their webs. can you imagine the potted basil in the window.

i love teeth and bones and feathers. i love little left-behind bug moults and snake sheds. i love snail shells, i love clumps of old fur. i love shed antlers and trampled flora, pawprints and hoofprints left in mud. i love shrieking foxes and mourning doves. i love slugs and toads. i love the smell of decay, i love the smell of rotting leaves. i love the smell of petrichor, of fed earth, wet soil just after it rains. i love muck and puddles and grass stains and burs stuck to my pants and sappy fingers. i love dewdrops on the grass, i love roly-polies under rocks, i love worms seeking rain. i love the earth and grass under my bare feet. i love the sun on my back. i love the wind in my clothes. i love the heartbeat of the earth. i love how she breathes.

i can't wait to be old. i can't wait to be wrinkly oma with silver and grey hair. i can't wait to have spotted, gnarled hands like tree roots, hands that have done so much: built, cooked, fed, felt, created. i can't wait for time, age, nostalgia, to wrap me up in a soft shawl, to cloud my memory and vision with rose. to look back on my life and see the follies that pain me so much now merely as soft missteps. i can't wait for the winter of my life, my autumn over, my life finding its silence, its peace. i will live a life vibrant and at my end i will know i walked as best as i could, until my legs grew too weak to carry me any further. at my end i'll become a young star and a button sewn onto the coat of time worn by all those i've known, the little waves made from my life neverending

i get home every day and hang my skin on the hook and take all my muscles and set them in my dresser and put all my bones under the bed and close my nervous system in the cupboards. i move around in my home just a pair of flexing lungs and a bunch of veins and a pulsing heart. then i put myself back together in the morning.

your bones are sweet
and sharp.
milktooth, my teething heart
all 32, white candy
sugary and nibbling me

gently rough hands
your throat in my ear like some big thunder
rumbling through, a hum
undoing me and undoing me like shoelaces, undoing and undoing me

warm coffee, coffee dripping onto my skin from your mouth
your darker caresses pulling flesh back and
dropping the grounds from your lips and
onto my bones

you eat and eat and eat of my fruit
and big monsteras grow from the empty hollow of my stomach
twining through the ribs and
swallowing the marrow of me