Don't take them off.

To see you as if on the brink of a waterfall, still wet from a misfired kiss goodnight, falling off the edge of your sleep into my own, snapped shut from your dreams

To see you as if your first tear had scorned my fingers, waiting for your eyelids to trick them out of sight like a magician's cape, still as a sheet of first snow, ready to shatter when you turn away.

To see you as if your bedside table had turned its drawers over to me with a sigh, dentures and after dinner mints intact.

A sight too intimate to be unveiled by a casual flick of your arm, a sight so intimate that even I haven't earned it yet.

Past the patch of sweat grinning the wet grin of an eavesdropper, I see them waiting, dark pearls waiting to be plucked before they shrink back within tricks of light,little squares of mirages and black-framed blankness. When you take off your glasses, you don't just blink yourselves blind, but blind me too.
And I ask myself, is it another pair of eyes that I see? Another's face?

They stared at me red-eyed, peering past slits of skin that lidded them. Not a number that could betray itself to me, they bruised my fingers black-currant when I prised them out. Like the unconfessed remnants of a congealed regret, clots sobbed into my hands, bleeding us both, two-minded, solitarily and in bitter red clumps.

I swallowed them unchewed in achingly quick mouthfuls,and they are wrested down my throat each time by the yearnings of your heart that eat into mine.