—- I don’t know how many of them there are. ‘enough to keep things guarded.’ you say I’m protected down to my every breath, but my thoughts scatter like a broken hourglass to that same place in the mind that weakens the immune system. and I don’t know how many there are lurking in the far beyond of that creviced awareness. your shadow grows the longer you hold me in-between the spaces of it. I speak so often of silence that you’d think I’d already fallen in love with it. but I don’t feel like I exist of and beyond the stars, I just feel stuck in one.