old shadows doffing their skinsuits
onto me, confessing:

problematically, yesterday has been welded to today
and we are the two children on opposite ends of a livid playground
with the same gum
stuck under our shoe.

we are a chicken-and-egg problem
that never hatched, a tree in a barren forest
of thestral oak that never fell.

we are a pair of Liar’s paradoxes, tightly wound
in our self-referentiality, our legs cinched
tighter than gears. and i have lost our coordinating
conjunction, antecedents binding to empty jaws.

we are two Legos rusted together,
the propinquity of our
tongues more due to holy moisture than
any grandfather clock’s precedent

we are a Japanese water wheel
subject to two different currents entirely.
you always perceiving our shallow surroundings differently,
I revolving around you.

we are two reporters with the same
scandalous ice cream store scoop
each working for a private diary’s after-thought editor.

we are two pendulums with opposite phases
clutching in that awkward moment of stillness
before our masses carry us to warring horizons.

you are the callus between my fingers
preventing me from holding you more softly,
and I am the emperor donning new clothes,
unchecked by your homunculus gaze.

the spider you spared from last Sunday’s broom
has woven an intricate web between our
neurons, and you have
become entangled in a quantum state of occupying
my arms.

you are the idiom in the formal paper
and i have taken up the obituarer’s pen
labeling the parts of speech occasionally
emerging from your breaths. the gerund phrases
still pulsate, a fierce parody of actions
prior to vivisection. into jars go the acrylic stench
of alchemy, the shotgun matrimony of always-twisting
fingers, the tendrils marching upon our mutual backs.

but despite this,
I am the greatest common factor between us
and the very least.
omnipresence implies divisibility into oblivion
with something still left on each side,
arguably more balanced.