It comes out stilted
filtered & scripted
when I love you
when I’m happy.

I’m tempted to
borrow tragedy;
the red wall,
the long fall.

The long haul &
the don’t look back
are needle to the
plow to the groove:

peculiar music
of the pastoral
neatly tailored
plot I chose.

In spacetime you’re a four-
dimensioned dimple.
Quite a lot of maths,
but still quite simple.

Haloes when you grin,
there’s no denial.
Two worlds define the
edges of your smile.

The bird bursting from your chest
is a crow, is a dove;
to escape the amniotic cul-de-sac
you go widdershins:
anti-magic engine thrumming:
impossible gravitas.

The beam bursting from your head
is a particle, is a wave;
you are the collapsing form
I cannot unsee;
the antibody lives on:
unapproachable parallel.

Look to windward. There it is. Could have seen it coming; didn’t. Such is life. There it is again, and again, and again. Look to windward though eyes tear up. There is life there no imagination could devise. Look to windward though it is cold. Still there is life there. Least expected places always. Right?

This is how everything is. No shoulder for the pack; the pack is anyhow carried. Passive voice. Active voice. Does it matter? Maybe. Or not. Lack of pronouns. The actors are frozen in place; the board is set. Not playing but being played. Brief bursts of energy. Movement. Choice. Illusion?

Look to windward. Stand still. Wind moves. Or wind stands still. Who moves? Invisible hands; so many.

I would not open the door of your unhappiness unless
there were no other way into the storm, into the night.
I would not enter, myself and the air I bring with me,
into that empty room and stand in a sliver of light unless
there were no other way to gauge your melancholy.
I would not close it behind me unless all the other doors
came unlocked, so that I could test their weathers,
the bluster and shadow of their various altitudes.
I would not open the door of your unhappiness ever,
except to perch beyond it and tell you that the world
is a cold, dark place when you are missing.

Are you bursting with the life
suddenly inside you?
The oblique impossible cord
winding round and round the poles
will strap you down.
The many-fingered consequences,
the thumb-wrapped miniature fists
will be ballast.
The punishing weight of gravity,
the body of your body,
won’t topple you.

Are you bursting with day
suddenly from grey on grey half-life?
Tell me how this will and that will
not steal you.

There she is
in a water world
in the shallow
wavelength
of a womb.

There she goes,
a sudden rippling
unfolding of
wings.

She can’t stay
in the cradle
forever.

There are few unique features to
this mass-produced trinket.
It sits in the cup of my palm
like an opaque, common liquid.
Strange, the immense value
of the memory it holds.
There’s no market for that,
no dollar figure.

Amble on and we’ll pore sweat over maps,
plumb with a chalk snap and mark twain:
this is the tributary where I first paid
the belle’s toll, a river of silver and gold.

Toddle on and we’ll find our sea feet
to the rise and swell of brine and stomach:
this retreating continent where I first voided
her saltwater kisses into a shallow trough.

Saunter on and we’ll cross swords and whiskey
shots across the bow like ships in the night:
the stern warning blinking dashboard red,
the iceberg, and the imminent disaster.

Old, found in a notebook. Verbatim.

I was so small. An infinite circle, but so small.
A perfect circle, an artifice, an unnatural symmetry.

If I outgrew the circle or if it shrank within me,
I don’t know. It is a tiny, significant, imperfect memory.

I remember stars like eyes askance circling overhead
while I stalked my claim. How I struggled to bring it down!

I remember the jaws closing round my neck.
I remember the tubes and vessels full of vacuum.

I remember feeling so small while the vice tightened.
The circle right around my few remaining waking moments.

I remember being blind and deaf and sleepless for a while,
but also I remember the knives. I remembering being cured.

And I am so small, the happiest infinite smallness.
Joy at being found dead and wanting death.

I remember the first time I realised it,
and how I fell into it and disappeared.