I am a dandelion in the hand of a child.
I haven’t the heart to tell her
that I’m a **** and not a wildflower.
So I don’t.

The stars are always aligned but I can’t always see
them properly. When the light is low and the moon is new
I can show you what Orion’s arm is pointing to,
a little cluster like us that hardly exists.

My mother used to tell me that my hands would be
too clammy to be held by anyone else
but she wasn’t counting on you.

Our fingers are woven tight enough that I feel safe
looking up-
we can take the constellations in turns, you first,
so that if the toe of your boot catches
a crack in the asphalt where moss is growing through
I can steady you.

And you would do the same for me.

The earth is so young. There will be
time enough for me to take you to the observatory,
to see properly how Orion stands ready
to catch the Pleiades.
We can watch it till sunrise, fingers intertwined,
blinking sleep from our eyes as the sun blinks the stars
from its skies, thinking:
that is you and I

****... all the children get a chance at the sandpit... only the dog collared ones attempting wrestling matches of biceps tonguing rhetoric touring waggle get the pulpit... kinda **** if you ask me: said sir sacrifice-a-lot when sir lancelot married; but all the **** happened after the ukrainian *****... it was the russian bourgeoise one... you forget you dim-witted bolshevik... the russian one... the russian one! not the ukrainian one! ah crap... too late, the crimson lunar eclipse from edinburgh to st. petersburg gave me mythological charisma; endeavour of the readers who can’t remember my tourism earning the year 2007 as distinct: i can earn an awareness of lying about the jealousy i have for the century of being a musketeer defending louis vix; ja athos! ein athos! i’m athos.... wrinkly & masturbated ******* toss! hey **, hey **... we dig dig dig dig dig, it's what we like to do... coal mine.... coal mine... coal mine... with a millionth diamond... we dig dig dig dig dig... hej **... do lasu by sie szło... high **! high **! unto abreit macht frei we go.

First: a soft statement
tolled out to a vacant page
ringing, and rebounding at the edges
as a quiet ripple set
to subtly amplify the light
of imagination.
The stone was dropped by --
what?
A hand that is as old as, or is older
than God.
It pushes through the water like a fish
without fins, it invisibly reshelves
the fluid memories from below
to above, below
to above until at last the rock,
the stone that is a soft statement at the top
of a once-vacant page,
clacks into place on the darker underside.

And then the poetry continues:
Crumpled Lightning;
A hailstorm of Words; Visions; Lines: Sparks;
all angled to mirror the space occupied by you,
even as it speaks of something else entirely,
even plummeting from every direction
to the point they blur - left to right, top to bottom -
the poem is a sheet of water,
a prism of distorted imagination showing you there,
you, clear as day, sharp as life
something, some piece of a thing, is made so clear
to you, a facet of life, a law of reality, or the inner clockwork
of a mind; you see just that much more of yourself
and that space you occupy in air, it is
that, though it may be masked by its magnitude, or its detail,
that is the quality what has wrapped your mind in a net.

So then the poetry concludes
with what?
Some three pillared, immovable declaration?
One scarcely held breath in the wind?
A clot of sky? A vein of iron?
You never fully expect it, no matter how often you are told.
Somehow, very likely inexplicably,
you recall some quality about beginnings,
drawing your eye to the top of the page
that started it all. The
First: a soft statement
an echo freshly familiar, despite
its elder weight; it was there all along
an echo, but an anchor of a stone
built for tethering all that poetry
to the underside of your mind.