I could sever my hands at the wrists without feeling any pain.

It’s easy; I imagine they are yours. You know I wouldn’t flinch at the sight of your bleeding stumps of arms, you mean that little. The placebo is so great in me that I sometime forget that I have hands at all, and for hours and hours, your hands traverse areas unknown to man or woman, land that I hesitate to chart by myself in broad daylight.

I think, or rather I feel, because your hands (your real hands, not mine masquerading as yours) are freckled with tiny venom-filled barbs. The venom of warm sunlight lain as leaf-gold upon endless poppy fields with joy catching on dewy leaves and crimped red petals, to be released upon contact. It stops me thinking. So I feel instead.

Instead of feeling simultaneously terrified and bored – actually to death – there is that sunshine raising pinpricks on my waist; tiny dots where you have defeated my rational existence and poked conquest flags into my skin.

Pain does not exist.

Fear does not exist.

Tedium and superiority and middle-class ennui do not exist.

All that exists are the countless pinpricks where you’ve sent countless new and wonder chemicals to strange and distant places that I didn’t know existed. Because I don’t chart my terrain when it’s light out, you know.

Anyway, severing my hands and replacing them with yours is more difficult now, because it has been so long since they have feigned chivalrous intimacy all over their left-handed path.

And just thinking of you, I feel like a sinner with papaver cheeks and somniferum lips.