I don't know what you are
little bit of braided wire,
or how you have come to make me cry.

Something about
how the heart gets larger,
spreads out like a cave the less we think.

Your muscle
the long fuse that does nothing
but burn up, your head slick and lethal

like a bull that gores the sword.
I whoop and lay out on the hum
of the reverb; you’re saving me really

from the stink I think.
For you break the body down
like a manual: bone spur, tendon, instep, pump.

For me, it's lawless myth,
the body: each valve a catacomb, each fibula
a wishbone, the elbow a rabbit's foot, the femur, first fire.       

__

Locking eyes with a runner around the twenty-fifth mile