Remembering him for a while today,
remembering just how much of me he had loved
when I didn't. The things he had seen
when I didn't see the distances he went.
To the moon and back,
it could have been.

To the moon and back.
Just how much of an effort
he'd gone to just to meet my hand
across the expanse is hard to believe.
Imagine the distance between
the moon and my side of his bed.
How difficult it must have been to breathe
how arid and how vacant
it must have felt. He never said.

I'd like to ask him what it was like,
trying to get to me-
ask about the journey
but we don't speak anymore, and anyway
I know how tiring it was, loving me.

Last year, Neil Armstrong died.
They scattered his ashes over the sea.
Somewhere between the moon and tide
there is something legendary

It was 1972, the last time a man on the moon
set his human footprint in.
Since then, no one has dared go back,
and instead send lunar rovers
to explore its cratered skin
and send in the satellites that send us answers
to the questions that we have about space
and do the learning for us.
Do the loving in our place.

I suppose it is safer that way.
To stay on earth and look at the moon
and admire it, from far away.
In the arms of whoever you can love,
with the expense of something like intimacy
surely it's better to be able to love
right up close, across smaller gaps
than the span of a galaxy.

The street where I've lived for three years until tomorrow is peaceful
and twilit clouds, more grey every day than the one before, are spinning
like ghosts interwoven around the clock tower on the corner
and meanwhile, a couple share their last kiss at a station
and meanwhile, a guitarist sings underground
and meanwhile, someone asks for help but it begins to rain.
Rain sounds. Traffic. No one listens.
Meanwhile,
women's eyes disappear,
in towards the back of their minds,
into the sky.
Meanwhile,
men count the days,
tug at their ties, a knot, a noose,
and they cry.
Quietly, someone somewhere is cutting open an arm with nail scissors.
Someone is screaming into a pillow.
Someone needs to be heard. No one listens.
We are a quiet cough in the polite throat of Fate.
We are burning up the blueprints drawn up of our stars.
The news channel roars. The mute button is switched on.
We are quiet and quiet and quiet.

When the crowds started their own Kristallnact
in the big smoke, it seemed Smaller
when tracing danger zones on maps, more and more
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx-
(Warning, X marks the spots that are burning)
It was a stampede of hooves money was lost on,
shattering windows and smashing streetlamps
and all the same, shrubs and roses were stormed on.
The horses don't have names anymore.
There are beings almost human
trapped in hospitals, trapped inside the women
not yet hampered by the world,
and those who created the women,
three decades before, sometimes
only a dozen years ago, somehow
still waiting and still wanting
another human being to be born.
If I could dream, I'd dance in my sleep,
but I am in the same stillness,
in the same uniform,
in search of footprints to follow,
for hunger, for scorn,
for dying flowers and an unknowable moon,
and the babies now laughing
and terrified and bored and the good ones
who fell in love with the wrong ones
or had too much, of the good or bad, too soon.
The only secret I've been let in on
is that it's the same when you die
as it was when you were born, but
all of a sudden, something small
in the churches and their clocktower clouds,
in the wires of a telephone,
in laughter in the sun,
is enough to allow sleep to come,
dreamlessly but peacefully,
inside knowing that even if we feel alone
we will always belong
to everything, everybody, everyone.

I'm not here to write romantic (when I try it sounds sarcastic)
and I'm not here to talk about the world we look out on
through eye windows- it's only earthy, it's only dust
and too much rain from too much sky
or too much space or too much city,
too sooty, too dry.

I can't find the romance in a square of tarmac
or even the rolls of sloping hills.
Give me discourse on the stratosphere-
for that is something I can lust over-
on heaven and on hell and on all the demons between.

Talk to me about the universe, per aruda ad astra.
Write something for me and show me only when I can
learn from it that there's more than
the shimmering stretch of stone and soil
between me and my appointment tomorrow at half past ten.

It's not much to ask, when you think about it
in a waiting room where minds have been lost;
It's not much to ask to want a reminder
that our lives are more
than what listlessly lolls beneath our feet
and that their prints are more precious
than just stamps on sand or concrete.

Excuse my drifting-
I didn't mean to kiss you like that,
I was just trying to swallow the space between us somehow
because I think tonight the moon was stillborn.
All the tides seem broken.

The space is dragging with plaintive collectibles=
complacency in yellow-teeth cliffsides, and all the empty shells
in which we'd listened for the corners of our ocean
and heard it ebbing, relenting, reaching.
It rippled on our skins and made us twinkle then.

Now I'm missing you, the grating bottle-glass shards
are what my headaches are made of
and are what fill up my shoes.

When our spines unravelled, I heard rain-
letter-writing weather, bathtub weather,
knitwear-perhaps-on-the-beach weather-
but the puddles were coming from the sun.
I don't know quite when summer blew in.

We would have found canvas chairs in the park.
You would be taking pictures of yellow daffodils
in black and white with your big heavy camera,
and laughing at each sneeze because I'm allergic.

There's really no need now to listen in shells
for the clutter leftover in elegy-
platitudinous phrases, photographs, plenty more fish in the sea.
Words couldn't ever weigh the depths of it.
Only abrade and erode it.

Yours is a world that, for immeasurable gaps
and for whirlpools and whale sounds,
I am not a part of anymore.
But please excuse my drifting.
I will always love the echoes
and walk along the beach in search of shells.

Forgive me, distant wars, for bringing flowers home.
Forgive me, open wounds, for pricking my finger again.
Forgive me, please, those who have had to wait
at railway stations or for hours outside my door
while I was flat to face, conscious but of somewhere else,
someone else, but never of dying or of war.
*Nothing to report from the bathroom floor.

In permanent ink, written on glass
he left two words
after death:
half full.