Near you it is hard to quit creating to be. Buzz, buzz, the bing-bing-bing of mind ricocheting off its own brainpan. Synapse after synapse after relapse. You're a blow to the basal ganglia, filling me full of bees and distraction. Months later the nation's hives are found missing. Guilty, Your Honor, though in my defense the flowers that blossom in my frontal lobe are irresistible. Fed on myelin and glia. Sugar-sweet and inimitable.

The joys of literal translation: "You write, is it not?" "I am writing nearly all days." Explains the beauty of blushing, of crossing one long and tailored leg over the other: ambiguity dissolving tasty on the tongue. I dreamt you loved me. We snuck notes hand-drawn and you nuzzled my shin with your foot. When I woke I beamed, rose, cracked my head and passed out. In those days I was literally sleeping in the closet. My futon crammed beneath a pasteboard bookshelf. When I came to I rubbed the bruise and cringing longed for you.

Must convince you that we should go palm to palm. That together we will look whole. I see from your neatly partitioned bicycle basket that you are fond of order. Me, too! Watch me admire the perfect squares of your plaid shirt, your uninterrupted creased khakis. I know how to iron, you know. Can put a mean ridge where wrinkles used to be, or flatten the lot, your choice.