memory is.

Memory is;
An androgene with an attitude problem. A black v-neck t-shirt; dark wash jeans slung low, white stitching around the hems and the pockets barely visible. S/He stands on the streat; hands pocketed, shoulders slumping, denim creases visible across slender thighs. Angular. Flipping cigarette butts from between long fingers – grinding them into the asphalt with a casual stomp.  He is

A rogue; a thief; a pickpocket. An unwanted face at a window. He dwells at the edges of nightmares; shapeless: unnamed. He is fear itself. Occasionally, somehow sequestered to answer to the powers-that-be; the law of your anarchic mind; he takes the witness box against his will. His sullen shrug answers nothing, but in that movement:
You feel the bones bend in his back; the vertebrae crack, and you know him. The beautiful burgular who sneaks at walls, and he is not to be trusted. His ambivalence marks what it hides. For he knows

Your ins-and-outs like a blueprint; he could mark on a map all the places you ache. He can feel them from inside, like hands on a wall groping at a switch: in the manner of someone accustomed to such dark places; small spaces. He knows your mind like late-night alleyways, and the gaps between bins when the corner stores call their fluorescent defiance to the slumber of the urban throng.  He took your life: such a perfect criminal that until that moment where

He felt your heart beat,
         wet and warm between his fingers

You never even noticed. All you had were slight twinges, fringes – bootprints and barbed wire – trapdoors, triggers, traces. Faces: the distant ring of alarm bells and helplessness: just an inkling, a scribble on a page in a drawer. Then, faced with a four-foot fall, you felt his grip and realised

Your chest was a cavern. All your best defences had failed, because you gave in. Once in your life you ceased to be an enigma and stood instead, naked, riddled with holes. You gave the crack, the cipher, to a girl. And you gave her the key to your

Rib cage. Or that's what he says, memory. A loiterer: in the deserted city of graffiti and boarded-up windows, nothing but the hum of a generator and a far-off siren. He stands and strikes a pose: flirting the line between carefree and careless; inscrutable. But we know he's a rat, the centre of this destruction, the calm in the eye of this storm: and he betrays two things:

You, and
   A hint of satisfaction.