I said to you:
“I want to fold inside you
Push aside your liver
Nestle amongst your intestinal tract
Curved under your sternum
My feet tucked against your pelvis
With my head resting sideways
On your fluttering diaphragm
So that it ululates against my cheek
I want to delve my fingers into
The soft mesh around your heart
My fingertips caressing pulsating silky strings…
And sleep.”
You said to me:
“Well, but I want to climb inside you
Slide down inside your mouth
Bedding into your kidneys for pillows
Resting my feet in your mouth
My toes massaging your pallet
The soft pink behind your teeth
Where your tongue clicks
To make tantalise and dedicate
My knees shuddering along the swallowing pipe of your throat.
But then of course
If we both folded inside each other
We’d be a Klein bottle.”
(by the way
I don’t really know what a Klein bottle is
just like I don’t know what to call people who climb inside each other and press their noses against the inside of your spine
I think a Klein bottle
is sort of like this:
take a tube
invert it
letting it pass through itself
the inside meets the outside
up and down is a bit confused
it can’t orient itself
a continuous one-sided surface
full of maths
people draw it as
yawning, and bulbous
tubular
I make ‘yews’ to make those words,
the ‘y’ semi-vowel like the fronted high vowel
’eeeeeeee’ lip spread
‘ooh’ is lip high rear rounded vowel
your tongue is bunched up high to the rear of my mouth cavity like the semi vowel
‘whuh’ from deep down my throat coming up
and then then down again
and it goes on and on
In a loop.
Smacking of lips is a momentary bilabial interlude.
A funny ripple and kink.]
So there we are
Folded inside each other
My cheek in your sternum
Your toes on my tongue
And there’s not much space
The rattling of bones
And whooshing of air
In an endless windpipe
And I am happy.
