BoundNOW, YOU HAVE me.
Now you have me, and I am helpless before you—tender as a new-sprung shoot, fragile as an evening bloom, hopeless as a seed cast upon the whims of wind.
It should not have worked, your binding—not even with your clever cord, cunningly woven of cobwebs and children’s cries, fowler’s nets and siren songs, need and greed, things meant to call, confound, confine. By chance or by destiny, though, you have managed to bind me to myself, so that it does not dissolve, your cord, does not fall apart and melt away like the ephemeral thing that it is, stuff of hope and gossamer and longing.
Instead, it chafes my skin—not only the skin that you see, soft and easily marked, human-seeming, but my secret skin, rough and brittle and all too easily bruised, all the same. You are th
