number one, count this off, start with your index finger, she was not, you made her up, you made them all up, even yourself, the person you wanted to be, who you wanted to be with, that nexus of.
number two, or is it one, the same one.
number three, an ancient custom, to triangulate, to measure distance by proximity to what is known. i knew you or thought i did. no one can really know such things.
number four, the littlest one, call her sister, family, the missing part. to be always suturing.
number five is not thumb. that is prehensile. separate. five is the palm, the mapping of. what is born, intractable, what is lived into.
flipping it over, meaning something other than. i meant to. what is true for only two values of. me and you. where i am constant and you are determined to be. where you are sex specific and i am sexing to.
let’s start again. there were three of us, always three and within that blood, the blue interiority. what pitch, what strange effluvium.
number six is the mirror, the comforting reflection. a murky presence, this ghosting of. echolalia is more disturbing, an unwanted accuracy, to hear over and over the last thing you said. they sound so strange, your words on another’s tongue. hold the sixth digit, this broken limb. speak to it of forgiveness. listen for the echo. within it is everything that should have, could not have been said.
number seven, almost symmetry, heptagon, an awkward nest. there are seven fundamental types of catastrophes. we lived them all. to be embattled, to be emptied from. the scorched wonder of aftermath.
what has become eight dimensional. we are thought to be creatures of. the first four are more familiar, part of our space time continuum. the other can only be mapped with numbers. the octonion is a numeric system central to string theory, to the unfurling theory of everything. when i put my palm on your chest, i could see the oscillations on the surface of your skin. you were holographic, a black hole. falling through the emptiness, bioidentical space.
nine is not enough. nothing ever was. the logarithmic probability that a fantasy can be inhabited long enough to be sated is zero. zero is expressed as two nines. invert one and you have the symbol of balance, the probability of.
ten digits, two palms, the incessant burrowing. a world buried beneath the other. to root down, the get caught beneath, ingrown. it is impossible to know anything other than this flesh, this layer of epidermis. another body, another life, a different galaxy. i have seen pictures. in one you had become another celestial body. unrecognizable, dwarfing your own history. to transcribe, to interpret, to erase. i can only measure myself by tithing. palms together, a steepled throat, i give one tenth of what i have taken. everything that remains.
