Head Bone: connected to the Foot Bone

She says not to be ashamed of crying. It's not shame, it's that I've shed enough over the years, enough tears to fill cups and saucers and tea spoons and pots. I've sprinkled them from shakers onto meals. Dipped them into the flour of my cakes and let them dint the garden beds.

The sympathy has run cold. The ice river and the barren tongue. You want my mental diary and some post addressed to you from my heart. There are no post boxes at my hip or near my collar bone. You can't telephone through my belly button with your fingers and your nails, and you can't trek my secrets by clamouring over my hair.

Little light flairs in your eyes, from reignited fumes of smouldering corpses. The emotions you thought you buried with sweat and pacing. Tastebuds that fizzled away over dizzying pink drinks. The groove where you pressed your tongue when you tried to pull on my shoulderblades to keep me by your grazed elbows and your bruised knees. The shake, the grasp, the swallow to keep you down in the pit of my stomach to protect you from the hearth flames of hatred and blackmail.

Cracks in the floor tiles, scaling the rift that your emotions left in the carvern of my lungs. Those that fell got burnt in the acid of my stomach, eating up the minutes that stung and flocked into momentary bright action. Those that made it clung to my bones, in the tiny microscopic dints, to be my immunity and my disease. My fibre and my musical strings for every joint. The hollow centre of gravity that keeps regurgitating organic patterns and toppling over into your shins and your chin by the stairs to your door bell.

The chord that runs from spine to toes tugs away, in a morse code pattern, letting you know that under the sheets there's still hope that you can peel back the sunburn and the lipstick messages on my calf. The rapid screech of neurons in distress from the tiny sounds of your breath in my ear, and the marching of armies of tingles over my ribcage in time to your heart beat, swelling and fading with my own breathing.

You've travelled only as far with me as the creases in my hands.