Empathy cannot bind to dead cells.

The cycle spreads through what remains without it.
Indifference infects the heart.
All creation drowns, and we sing.

I stop singing to the water just long enough to breathe.
I hear you beneath the weight of salt:
“I love you,” you whisper,
and it hooks into my lung.

I was a hungry ghost,
feeding on the silence of the drowned,
until the “Me” finally starved.

I offer a graft of my own skin.
I bleed into the “You,” the collateral,
until the pulse becomes one.

My living cells recognize yours
a biological confession.
The “Us” is the only marrow.

I reach to you.
We drown
a different way.
There are still songs.
There are others drowning in different ways.

The songs vibrate stone back into bone.
The cycle heals through mitosis:
the selves dividing
so the others may breathe again.

The songs continue.
Creation is still drowning.

And the bell rings because it is struck
In a different way.

I am the strike. You are the bell.
You are the strike. I am the bell.

I refuse for you to be the price of my safety.
You refuse for me to be the price of your own.

We sing.

All creation is still drowning.