“Writing to you is like kissing you. It is something physical.”
— Simone de Beauvoir, from a letter to Nelson Algren c. November 1949
as an aesthetic, I like a hushed chorus
but only when trust is visceral &
bent around a promise—or a threat
arranged curious, this casual normalizing devours
so we follow a line or a thread until safely curated
tangled into the finest shouting fragments
subbed as loaded derivatives & mocked influences
we have learned to manage public feelings to epic scale
in privacy’s absence, such division is essential
these inhabited suggestions becoming their own revenge
