The heat is a ladder,
a sheet of wet minerals
turning white in the blue silence.

The heat is a word
spoken between two people
a thing neither living nor alive
neither dead nor dying
a place where birds
roost silent
in a tree,
a pair of folded wings
a place
where a man sees the
whole of himself in a mirror
as he is, sweating, hot,
hairy, human,
dirty armpits
everybody’s political fairy
and your own human subject
who can remove all
his clothes
but can’t escape his skin.

The heat is a place between
two people full of sweating
and clouds building up
where the night comes running
out of your watery skin
and sweaty
with every stench
that comes from
you breathing
your identity
in and out
like running water

The heat is where our bodies
cannot escape.
Every word becomes a sweat
enveloping our skins.
Every word an entrance
into a sulphurous storm
made of lightning
and rain compressed in stones
that will shatter this heat
with violent force.
Every word a place
of agony and the realisation
that lightning tears
the shining water
of rain
into transient rainbows
that nobody can ever
catch.

When you ask for water.

I dreamed you as a bag of bones and flesh, saw how the cartilage was joined delicately together. You lay on a bed asleep. Then you sat up and mumbled a strange language. Then you collapsed many times. People came and held your hands and mumbled inanities. You did not want them, you wanted your glasses and a glass of water but your tongue wouldn’t lift. I heard you. I bought you water. You gurgled. You drank. They carried you away in a black bag in your pyjamas. They did not forget your false teeth either, which were in a glass of water next to your bedside. They zipped you up, and said nothing. This is why you can only speak in my dreams. It is the only way I will understand you. Where you rattle and make my memory dance. Where you come to me and ask for water.