Against Tenderness

1. If language exists, it is only to account for earth’s casual depressions, twin rivers separating as though single notes in a song, irrepressible. 

2. Correction: this note is a warning from history. 

3. In the gallery above the orchestra seats, a view from another Heaven, an impression, displaced. 

4. The horns, contorted metal, empty themselves into the antechamber, andante, an inexorable march of machines, a parallel answer to the thrum of bass, the steady pace of the tympani a call to arms, satisfied. 

5. Every second, time signature as disturbance, is built for violence. 

6. Correction (amended): this note speaks against tenderness, the conjuring of a face suspended mid-air without a body, flesh unwound. 

7. What do we call this separation, the wrist resting over the clavicle’s bridge, its weight a reminder, a different kind of music for unwritten films? 

8. We wait for a signal (how light attends your eyes), un suspiro contra la noche. Is it you who turns the key, testifies to a name? 

9. No matter. Mutter. There is no matter. Madre. There is no— 

10. There is no claim to our shared inheritance: We have decided to keep you from the edges of your own body.