You reach out from inside a prison of physicality;
you live inside the dripping dark of your prison self,
and your echoing self-absorption is
the pick-scarred masonry
of your incarceration.

I signalled my nakedness outside your barred window,
releasing just-emerged imagos of besottedness
from a bared breast,
breathing them into unfurled flight
from their awkward binding sheaths,
unfolding their wings' mirrored couplings
and willing you to merge tenderly
with their fluttering ascension,
with their pulverised riskiness,
with the powdered impermanence of their supple-ings.

But all you could do
was pace the four walls of your stoniness,
while my butterflies, almost soundlessly,
huffed their fragility,
circled for a breathless instant,
and then escaped in a flickering phantasm,
a phalanx of immaterial dapplings.