An Execution

Pushing past the gauzy, trembling veil of half-consciousness,
I breathe myself back into the waking world.
Before my knot-tight muscles flex, feline, in their ritual reach for the ceiling,
a lazy glance drinks him in where he sits,
nestled contentedly in the realms of fantasy,
playing General to an slovenly army of pixels.
"Good mornings" are exchanged in a pair of lissome smiles,
and I arch myself, loosening my bunched-up fibers little by little,
before my traitor eyes tug me back to him.
They've got that look again, frail, turncoat spheres,
that look that wrenches open my tough binding,
allowing him to read me,
read me down through my very first draft.

His "what is it?" spills (hap)hazardously
from half-parted lips stretched in a backward grin;
rhetoric catches me hard beneath the breastbone,
sends me reeling while my twin deserters
defect back to me. Dampened by chagrin,
they plead their wordless case feebly.
He approaches softly, his ever-radiant concern
dwarfed by persistence:
"What is it? Tell me."

I can't resist.


Three words.


For one breathless moment he holds me
at knifepoint,
then –

"I know."

He twists;

I stop breathing.