Dusk's fire vanishes into me these days,
a simmering that chills the soul,
an eternal gravity of parted ways -
yesterday, a lifetime ago.
Those resigned retreats I have beaten, it seems,
have all folded upon themselves
in this samsara of half-abandoned dreams
with their twisted trajectories.
Words stoppering my throat return to the pen;
they come out all messy and wrong
in discordant collisions time and again,
denatured by decrepitude.
The alternating current leaping through weeks -
snippets of a life without me -
rampages, heedless to memories it wreaks,
feeding the voltage in my brain.

I have confined you to a prime number beyond my own imagination
to turn my blade on a yet time-frozen heart;
but all I find carved upon the blocks I chop it into are your initials,
indivisible cube roots of memory.

this week is melting into the last again,
an unspooling reel of denatured days whelmed in a geodic cavity of suspense.
entombed air turns stale quickly, curable by neither smoke nor innumerable crystalline mirrors refracting the lightning blinking in my window.

occupation's familiar musk hangs heavy,
pierced only occasionally by storm sounds.
the flightless beast of languor growls an uneasy thunder
rolling adrift in a hollow sky, phantom wingbeats striking my temples
as I recoil at the realisation that my tormentor is my pulse.

lucent orbs of twilight gemmed in a shapeshifting head
stare at any number of absent realisations guilty talons rake deep into the void,
yet even this suicidal contemplation snares in ephemerality.
we barely remember to maroon the latest self-undoing consecration.

A compass in my thumbs deposits me variously reincarnated on the doorstep of our conversation,
yet each time an infant wrapped in a different blanket.

Long have I pored over the spectrum of untrammelled human emotion,
spanning cover to cover in this self-forbidden grimoire prefaced with bearer risk warnings.

Now my tongue plays host to an intermittent rebellion of intangibles,
each laconic usurper alacritously poised to halt a never-ending coronation.

Hope-marbled milky shadows beckon softly with a sleepy seduction,
searing the remaining threads of her stitched through my fibres: a cyborg-like tingling.

I wonder if we have all along been welding another contradiction onto our feet,
birthing the latest excuse for returning to our destiny under the yoke of newly-minted gods.

I am the hedged question put to a bland catalogue. Perhaps there is no right to expect anything more than diluted answers.

The rose buds are falling off, a bell tolling in silence, an uneasy clock slowly sweeping fairy dust with its bare hands.

Soon the paint will dry, congealing thick and fast on the brush tip it has never left. It is pungent as a rotting flower.

Watered-down doubt flowers, its roots grazing my conviction. I fear the simple answer will undo my seasoned justification.

There is little good in ex post defibrillations. Ambulances are not made for chasing after Frankenstein fairytales in various reincarnations.

Sometimes I am the whip-flailing horseman charging into tomorrow
On the fevered hooves of the present while
Safe under my cloak against sunset-red clouds of kicked-up dust.

Sometimes I am the frantically zigzagging prey half-blind with fear
Cursing the double-dealing wind that lashes against my hide
And feeds my scent to the ravenous hounds of the past.

Perhaps I am both hunter and quarry in a simultaneous paradox
Which explodes from the shattered fiction of single-mindedness
Into fresh awareness brilliant and dark and incomprehensibly vast.

For all I know I could even be a sprite tossed haphazardly in a Bermuda Triangle
Above fault lines where yesterday's memories collide into the future
To birth strange whirlpools of thought stirred by phantom hands
Waiting for me to join them below among hulking carcasses of rust.

Orange earplugs, pill-shaped, one pair:
for use when pretending the neighbours' furniture-dragging is comforting invariably fails.

White humidifier, cylindrical, spewing vapour:
twenty minutes per cycle. Each manual reset is a life lost and there is no Player Two.

Day curtains, thick and heavy, one set:
to evade the pincer of lunar Cyclops' glare and unblinking orange streetlights.

E5:E2: the projection clock spits on the wall, fresh red and upside down:
it's almost midnight. I shall feign death until the whirring in my head dies.