the worm in the apple is the knowledge that once, for a time, you worshipped me how that set me apart, made me less real more a mirage in the mind of a sad man who’d had a great deal to drink, the mirror of me worshipping you, an imaginary man sitting across from me, distanced from me by the white tablecloth, the green bottle wine we’d both drunk to the lees — lees that now unsettle me, a fibrous sediment damp, dark red, smelling of fruit, of trees