You have made me feel things that I hardly knew I had in me. You delved inside the lepers within me, stripping me off my vanity and pre-conceived depravity. You made me talk with tears and smile with avalanches in my head. You gave me moments of despair and jubilance alike, tearing me into pieces with thoughts of revenge and love all the while. You said you were like the tree below my window, beautiful but just named badly. I believed you then, and loved the tree more and more slowly. I learned to fall and then rise in love bit by bit, in parts and pieces. The whole of you seemed too distant then, pickled with the ghosts of former selves. I did hang on not knowing why. The rewards or penalties I shall pay later. It can wait for now, coz we still have loads of breaths to take. You’ve made me just a specter of the dogmas of the numerous past lives I still carry in my skull. Like a bad disease and stubborn optimism refusing to leave, your voice is what I want ceaselessly as solace.