The first voice was the heart, remember? That trembling little martyr whispering, use me, ruin me, I’ll pretend it’s love if you pretend to care. Now comes the second voice, the body’s voice, rawer, hungrier, stripped of metaphor, offering itself up with the same doomed devotion but without the poetry to cushion the fall. Same machinery, different angle. Same altar, different sacrifice. Together they sketch the whole delirious circuitry we pretend not to worship, desire looping into power, power looping into need, need looping into that soft, parasitic prostitution we all practice in the dark. Don’t look away, you know exactly what I mean. It’s in you too, that little engine of ache and transaction, that gorgeous ugliness we dress up as romance or rebellion or “just being human.” You can feel it humming under your ribs right now, can’t you? That secret economy of wanting and being wanted, of offering and being taken, of giving yourself away just to see who bothers to pick you up. Don’t lie to me, I’m talking about us.