~this is not an apology, although i owe you many. this is just a story, that will one day be little more than a fragment of a memory.~*
i heard heartbeats under water, and found myself fishing. there was light on a horizon, unmade. stifling change. you, on unimagined shorelines. there was wind through trees, boughs shaking: i, reflected in leaves tumbling. our paws, through leaf-litter and pure chance, met. we were ghosts, hopeless and beautiful.
the waterline obliges & breathes, though. the walls are
pristine, and all is coffee-stained and content.
so, an agonist's thoughts, the hands of fate's implausible existence, some ideal named virtue, laid out in beds of unsent letters, touched our lives for one turning moment. there, we were left to swim until we sank, and i drank cold water and thought of you and the sky, and how sometimes our hands are made to feel smaller when both the sun and the moon hang, on tiny strings, intersecting every six months or so.
or how i could feel nothing had changed, or stayed the same.
and my hands feel smaller by the day, as
i watch shadows across the fractions
of the moon; and guess at how you may
feel the same, or if you look at all, or
what generates these soft mechanisms of hurt.
thus, we set out to measure the earth, one palm's-length at a time, and laugh and ache all the same. and once, you'd said, gently, that i was beautiful, and i got so frightened that i choked. i was so convinced that i'd hurt you. i was so convinced that i was worth so little, and that you'd figure it out. and maybe i did. and maybe you did.
we sing songs in our heads all the time, though,
recite one another's words in slow light. and i
feel less like a ghost, as my shells shrink back
onto me; but, there are still bits missing that
branches tore away and sent to you, on the wind.
we walk right-turning paths, and, as much as
i try not to tie my footprints up, they remain
cycles, dirt-trodden through patches of brush; and
my soles stay as cut-up as my thoughts, and,
out on endless concrete, i smile unconvincingly and
squint, as to make out where or what to be.
in dreams, i meet you out on the backfield.
we sit on the fergusson intermediate driveway
and exchange silences, eloquently. in dreams,
we dance and kiss in the hallway and i stop and
remember how nobody's wanted to kiss me
for three years. in dreams, you are gone, out to
sea, and i wonder if i thought this all up and wake,
to a dream, where my father is ill but won't admit it,
and has cleaned the walls of the washroom. there,
i hide and feel hollow, so sure that nobody will notice; and
realise that my father is always fine and maybe i'm
the one that's ill. i hear your voice, through doors
and halls and continents, and consider that there
are unmeasurable aspects to our shorelines and
psyches and
how i managed to turn out to love you.
in dreams, i see my best friend, now not in quotation
marks, and wake and feel stabbing pains in my
chest; a star in the sky for each time i have
crafted abandonment, until the night fills up with
blinding light and, finally, i am clean and pure
and know nothing, save the warm lap of
dawn's reprieve at the window. i stay
in place, reeling and absurd
motionless realities playing out on the end
of each fingertip, with your blink-patterns
singing morse through my haze; the entire
world, folding down to a cascade of
hurried cries from a small bird, losing its
nest in the glow. it spreads wings and
claws out from my ribs, and heads north; this
small bird, called hope, cartwheeling out
*to the ends of the earth, where heaven is just
a sequence of your most beautiful memories, and
there's you, angel on the oceanside,
dancing within my last breath.
i'm sorry