In this strange intimacy,
less than my body’s length between us,
you step forward
and I lean in
and three feet becomes two
and I smell the smoke in your hair.

I breathe deeper, that it may bring us closer still.
That one breath of your air might find its way to me,
might enter my own lungs
and make its home in this decaying ruin.

My flesh will yield to a new fever,
transfused with the life it ought to know;
The pathogenic stillness in your steady brown eyes
taking me in both hands.
Showing me how this body ought to be used.