ceramic raze inside your chest is a fan blowing fins. when electric current meets the right amount of resistance, it warms your breath, and you give it all to me, scentless but for the blurred hiss of time. you kick me almost thirty years into the past. i'm on a two-week diet after being poked with lancets so the doctors can figure out what's wrong with me and why i'm coughing all the time when my swollen tonsils are already long gone. i'm eating things i've never eaten before. lamb. salads with homemade oil and vinegar dressing. sandwiches that don't make me want to sell my tongue to the highest bidder. i'm assigned a new ritual. every night i sit at a table with a bowl of boiling water beneath my chin and a towel draped over my head. for half an hour i stare through a dark blue veil, breathing in steam. the veil turns a different colour when i stand up without thinking. the towel pulls the bowl toward me. it tips over. scalding water soaks the lower half of my body. i get undressed in the bathroom, trying to imagine how my dead flesh will look before it falls. my legs are only a little red. after a bath i'm as good as new. i have different rituals now. i watch you sway back and forth, back and forth, and let your gentle oscillation lull me into waking sleep, breathing in something less than oxygen. 211216 what's it to you? who go blather from