The dreams grow stranger and stranger. I sleep beside my cousin and it is too hot for sheets. We occupy opposite ends of the bed and the heat of our bodies produces a wall of invisible fire through the middle of the bed which neither of us can approach. 

My hair is waxed straw and smells like a work animal. When we have eaten meat our bodies rot and are slick. When we have eaten vegetables they are dry and cold. The spicier anything is, the more proof against poisons in the blood.

Yoghurt is popular. It is cold and builds white cities in the stomach that protect from the steaming dull teeth of the circling dogs.

I wake up with my arm sore, and my lungs flopping like the twin ends of a pinched worm in my chest. Music has been playing all night.

I go around, and see men my age, soft and ugly and always pretending and I am filled with wonder. Where have their souls gone? The part that is like a little diamond inside a stone which no one can touch. Do I still have it? Did i discover it, or was it counterfeit? They are like the knot at the end of a twirling rope, who refuse to believe they are swung by a hand at the end of the braid, and even refuse to believe in the braid itself. They fall like stones down a well ignorant of their cause. And I fall too. And I am a swinging knot. 

Here I dream about love every night.