I woke up in the middle of the night and wrote a love letter to my depression

I open your body and observe

the wasteland—dirt, reduction, and poison

with barbed-wire breath more comforting

than your empty heartbeat. In turn,

you open mine and search for a word

that means my worship. Tell me,

you say. Your body is a ravaged battlefield

of unspoken prayers. Your body

imposing mycelium. Your body enveloping mine.

I say, revival. I whisper, loneliness.

///

Shades of black. The most beautiful

darknesses you were. My skin shivers

from your familiar touch, the stomach

snaking deeper into itself in blurry

recoil. Bones house the horrors

ringing in the crevices of the hollow—

we made love too often

for my own taste. Our habit was

to keep the window open so that

we both could breathe the autumn

atmosphere of dusk remnants and colder

whispers. In that, I mean

you were always such a tease,

a metastasizing fear of falling

further into insanity until

only the shell remained. Blood

turned to liquid shadows. Heart

turned to stopwatch. The outside

turned to a smallness I’ve only

known in the worst dreams,

the most careful of nightmares.