1.0

My phantom.

Mine.

The only thing to call my own.

2.0

How many steps to get to you?

Eight thousand five hundred and twenty two?

How many words to get across to you?

3.0

My words bend the space between our bodies

like folding a paper airplane.

And, much like the product,

they will never fly.

Your words form shadows form fingers

that ghost along my flesh: your almost-presence

Sustains me. But not enough.

3.1

Words are not sentient blocks

with which we assemble a rickety bridge of hope

and drive across it our cars of logic

-- faith, reason,

optimisim, affection… logic.

Words cannot form a rope

to throw down a well

to save each other from starvation.

3.2

But your words

suggest something of bone and concrete

and steel to reinforce my paper airplane’s wings.

And, clutching these bones,

I lurch into unfamiliarity. Blind.

I trust your words

not to leave me bitter

of the words that I chose to trust.

4.0

Your body is characters, meticulously arranged,

The empty space between us comrised of

punctuation: a million periods. Two thousand

semi-colons. Five hundred and ninety one

commas, apostrophes, and asterisks. Six

billion spaces.

Your soul, a paragraph

scratched-out and rewritten

over

and over

but still a thing of beauty. A masterpiece.

5.0

I reach out for you and your words

but touch nothing.

You are an apparition.

You always have been.

But the apparition is mine.