i’ve been thinking a lot
about your hand in mine
the way that our fingers
and palms intertwine

but i think about death
about loss, about worth
i admit that i fear
to return to the earth

where our bodies dissolve
into roots of a tree
and will grow into trunk
then limb, then leaf

but i've heard from a bird
that death will reverse
and your heart will beat hard
like it did at your birth

so hold on for dear life
with your hand in mine
if death makes us let go
it is only for time



© Mike Mortensen

I. Entrance

We gather at the quay.
I accuse you, you present the evidence disproving me.
It goes this way for some sampling of forever,
until one’s neck pops, loses vitals.
Clinging to muscle, marrow.

This wharf, an apocalypse story, has become
a trusty habitat. Only nights here.
Sometimes when the moon gets closer, I tap you.
Tell you,

‘How beautiful, how bigger.’

But you remind me:
bigger moons mean higher tides, up to our shins.
It becomes more difficult to wade, walk.

This is what I fell for, your eye for consequence.
What did you see in me?

We start coming apart soon, we hear it from miles away.
It nicks at us via vibrations and frequency,
tap water dripping, scuffing sounds beneath the floorboards.
I notify you immediately. The occurrences of anomaly that speak for us.
I encourage its meanderings and delay. You want to sit it out, too.

So we sit. In a time-tune tick-tock launch-dock gallivant.


II. Exit.

I am merely dangling from your rope, this is
The Image; tied to your *******.
We have managed to keep it that way.
Until I learned the pendulum effect and swung away.
Swung away.

Your purchasing power will work on a new, polished person, I’m sure.
I can’t, anymore.
You harvest me, but you don’t distill me.
I sleep in a silo, I talk to ghosts. They tattle tales—

History lessons


III. Escape Hatch

The sound, the nuisance, the indication, develops a raspier voice.
The vibrations eat on the pollen of our delay,
and at one point
we combust.
Alarms go off.
People get to work.
Normal sequences play out.
I think of you, then I can’t.
Soon you’re a phantom atom in a fog, diffusing slowly.

It will end with an engine dying.
In receipts with faded ink. Movie tickets.
A broken cinema chair will remind you of it.
But that’s fine.
Some say there will be nuclear waste
one has to dump somewhere, some vacuum without portals.

But we make portals.