Still

Your heart still beats in my chest
with a coarseness that scratches my
lungs, and sometimes still I spend
sleepless nights lost in your sleepless city.
Sometimes still your feet fill my shoes and
your air fills my lungs as they itch next to your beating heart,
and soon you’re making your way through my veins
like a guest who’s outstayed their welcome,
someone somewhere they shouldn’t be,
but who I still can’t bring myself to ask to leave.
I feel my shirt sticking to my back,
the ink from my book blemishes
my finger tips, my shoulder presses into another
that will not find its way home with me in these sleepless nights.
Nor will your shoulder that I still think to lean on
while I spend my hours awake in a bed half
damp with sweat and half uncreased and perfect,
because you spend all you can coursing through me.
And yet still, despite you being in my chest
in my shoes
in my lungs
in my veins
being in all the wrong places,
to consider it wrong feels wrong and I resign myself
to a coarse heartbeat whose rhythm I cannot
predict and still gives me sleepless nights.