8. The wild inhuman nature spirit of perfected mating safe beneath the cloak but still in flight, each night more bone cage bound. For best behavior medals coined from fresh heart gnawings.

Her attractive pain helps love to find her.

Nighttime in the window across the way, an embrace? No, a woman reaching up into a kitchen cabinet, a pincering through empty space.

Consigned to life among the woman too disturbing to find love just yet. Perhaps among the ruins, perhaps among the carcinogen-seeping drifts of plastic beverage containers that will engulf our world.

All is maya. Perhaps in another, realer world we live in Revere, we've been together eight years, we spend the weekends at Nell's, she used to freebase and I still sleep around.