without you, it's not as much fun to pick up the Pieces
Chasing their mud blood and chased by his own on her arm as he spins Dorcas out, all champagne-glass and simpering; in the alleys behind the charity balls, after the shrieks, after the winter after the shrieks, marble-faced as that expectant thumb drags over his chilled knuckles like a threat, or maybe a prayer; stillness ringing (everything has always rung his ears dizzy, even nothing, and so he is always searching) until the hours she finds him and patches his deliberate accidents, over her snaps and raps and leaves and inside the shredding of her creamy back, behind the shawl of her indoor shame (the snow catching her eyelashes is full of boiling endings), dreading his audacity to call them a love story, scrabbling at the vertigo of their flesh and the vermilion of his carvings, so possessive, so possessed—
—Tom does not weep, and Tom does not pray, no he doesn't.
