Night Shift

The estate lugs its weight in untranslatables;
your scoured fingers uncouple second skin
and limb by limb the seams become undone.
Outside, cats mewl into night’s black brick,
bittersweet cloys tongue the way morphine
does, or molasses caught on a spoon’s back.

We sit quiet in the planetary face of the TV
while an artificial halo radiates our temples;
you fan your bare chest with a medical visor,
stretched along the sofa like a black hyphen.