Love Bones

Bedsprings crochet bones together. His back is sutured to gripes stitched to gummy joints. In the toilet, avoiding the mirror, humming softly, shunning conversation with himself - the ceiling drips a sump of memories. The park --- Frances revolves confused. "I don't understand." A phrase with self-winding words. A slight miscalculation, a turning away at the precise moment she turned towards him; an error of timing really. Frances whirs on "I don't understand." Later he understood she overdosed. He imagines this lethal power over her life to be his. Time whittles cavities with calcifications. Softly the spine of a storybook breaks - where one stitch patches a sorrow a spur prods and rips. When he listens to the hollows between the long vertebrae of his life, he hears a theory crumbling away under slowly grinding cogs.