Shiver

We had all gone deaf.
The silences had been so interminable, so exacting and reprehensible
that we'd abandoned all use of our ears. They had become terrors.
The corridors were the worst, when we passed one another
inching carefully by, afraid of touch,
and loathing the chance mixing of our breaths.
At night we lay awake, our minds sick with worry -
just don't let any of us ever take a tumble along those grey passages
not on a bumpy bit of floor, or from the puddle where the wet clothes drip,
and never, never in our presence.
Not one of us knows how to hold, much less comfort, a real, live body.
The warmth will be the devastating.