As I’m sure you know, it’s hard to hear a thing through the static snow which follows the afterglow’s last show. You may not know that it’s not impossible.

She says that on the surface – and for quite some depth beneath – you are solid apathy. A newborn neglecting the new world. Codependent with the stillborn silence you can produce at the gentlest graze; sicut lux stellae. One more junkie, pawning the best of himself for something else.

She says the vast void you wear like skin has an attractive force; the great black ghost of gravity. Impossibly weak and harder still to see, even from the valleys and peaks of our grasp and reach. Souls, wandering the waking world’s worst wilderness without, hear your song in the trembling, pleading voice of a lover. Enchanted, enamored with your lure of fathomless longing, they never see you coming and only hear your promise once, long after it is irretrievably kept.

She says your eyes rest in utter indifference; twin black holes, terminally bored with themselves and their quarry. No gleam, no glint, no hint of anything at all between them. No charge, no mass, no spin; empty, but for the hellbent intent to grip every last one of every last thing.

She says your smile is the worst of all possible worlds, unlit by its own radiant greed and your vacant lust for consumption at all cost, and for the cost as a second course.

She says the contours of your face are the best thing about you, and in another line of work you might have been fuckable. In the hinge of your jaw hides some trace of something; perhaps an idea you once had, some dream of love you mangled and consumed too quickly, never bothering to clean up the mess. She tells me your cheeks remind her of something. What do you think it could be?

She says your hands could pass for immaterial accidents, some meaningless happenstance of creation. Impossible to hold in presence or to miss in absence, incapable of touch, impervious to sense. Manual automata, mere stone enslaved to your ravenous seeking.

She says you keep the rest of yourself concealed from view, and that to confront it would unravel you from the center. Inconceivable insecurity interred in an apparently impenetrable abyss at such depth as to beggar description before devouring it altogether. But through a hole in the wall beyond the cosmic background, she watched you undress. Buried deep beneath your bare reason to be, you are deathly afraid of something. What is it?