When you're asleep you dream although you say you don't. The shudder as you turn over the last time, and your lips mumbling into the hairs of your crooked arm -- and when I remove my glasses to prevent the least obstruction of the lamp which you allow me for my crossword puzzles, even under the shadow cast by my head I can see the ripple beneath your eyelids -- they indicate dreams, of other places, other bodies, a dream of at least one other body.

As you lie through the random hoots and rumbles from the street, and the bottles dashed against the sidewalk -- all the ways men leave their marks -- I feel a secure complicity, with you, with him; trying not to wake you, my hands tremble in a familiar way and caress you with his fingertips.