If you decide to climb

or, if some decision made millenia ago in a dark corner never observed, results in a force which sends you tearing through the stratosphere, keep in mind that any direction you turn in may result in the response of a row of glistening teeth, that perhaps you would have never encountered had you remained bacterial and incubatory. Though this is not accounting for love in the dark at kitchen surfaces, pouring bleach on seeds of foreign dreams, messages curving gracefully in unlit geometry, paths carved in the wake of a prison escape, that pose some invisible threat to the composure of their desired futures.

The higher you climb, the tastier your soul may appear. Your heart an amalgam of puncture wounds and held in the grip of the teeth of children who will never grow old, but which multiply in number until the force that sent you toward the heavens is unable to carry them, negated under their combined weight.

Built from scratch. Each time. In the shadow of a closed system, encompassed by skin, you exchange light with the simple habits which allow you passage. Feeding them intelligences incomprehensible from the peak on which you stand, but broken down and nullified based on assertion from the singular frame of reference which led to you. Telling them, in no uncertain terms, to love the monster you carry relentlessly, for this is on what your survival depends, mercilessly flagellating while they pull you up, a process which grinds them to their very core, inevitably leads to weakness, and finally sleep. A blindness they will be punished for.

Meanwhile, floating in a park, a grin firmly asks what appears to be a dog to 'sit'. It rolls and scrabbles around, a limbless yolk, glowing acidic, and chuckles at its unquestionable constituents. Eyes fixed on a crazed light, its every motion a gesture toward mouth, obedient responses to its barked commands pulling its chin high, as though its entire structure can be validated by something's yielding response to an empty threat implicating its superiority.

Hearts beating in synchrony. Their combined size dictating their amplitude. From a perspective of distance, one may drown out the other, forcing it into quiet servitude of whoever dictates themselves the larger. Equal, their desire may pull open a rift which encompasses the harmony alluded to by their combination.