perspective:
to dream & then
blink

the glassiest birds
hang from your fingers

‘don’t breathe faster,
don’t perspire.
it’s only us.’

i still don’t know who you were talking to.

I held your hands in mine and felt them bleeding.
You said you’d been digging graves.
It explained the dirt under your nails but
not the dust in your eyes,
somehow clouded by the devil we despise.
I asked if he told you to dig these holes,
too small for a child,
too large for our souls.
You simply mixed the blood and the earth and
out of the dirt made a home for us both.
You said we could live till we needed to die,
and the graves would comfort our homelessness fine.
You said we could die till we needed to sleep,
weary from tears shed while we can’t sleep.

And in this home,
accidentally us
could fine the right stumbles and maybe once touch
before we’re buried again in the dead of the earth,
where we are each other,
married in birth.

i stutter.
that is a moment.
you look at your shoes, for something to say.
that is a moment.

we were a moment once.
endlessly falling through the present,
flying as roots do through the ground.
we were a moment.
like a tree is a moment of the earth,
like a tear is a moment of the heart.
we were a moment of each other,
our lungs were the skies
and our souls were the earth
and we were that tree
with our roots connected
into the bleeding ground of our present.

we were a moment once,
and for that moment the earth watched.
the roots embraced us.
the trees sang a tone too low to hold,
so we simply stumbled through the moment that was us.

i find my words.
you find your sense.
the ground sighs, releasing its breath.
i am a moment.
you are a moment.

there’s a streetlamp on an avenue,

it throws out tiny galaxies of light.

they falter as they reach the outer layers of the cobblestone highway.

the light dances in a soft ballet with the shadows -

a plié that picks the innocence out of allies,

a pirouette that smiles at your doorway.

you might be slumped behind it

pretending the rugged wood is everyone it isn’t.

i hope you are.

if you are slumped behind that doorway,

with the light and dark dancing to a thousand phonographs,

i might be able to imagine you as someone who didn’t need a door.

someone who could take a door and see it as a door;

not a mother,

or a dog,

or a soundtrack,

or a piece of set.

i could imagine that you haven’t become a dramaturge,

that instead you see every movement and static implication

as crushingly real.

i would be able to watch reality wring your chest,

grind at your ribcage,

and that would hurt less -

watching you be torn apart and ground to dust

at the same time

by a reality that hates us both.

it would be the tiniest bit better,

because i can help you fight anything.

i can sand beside you and at least allow my remains to become dust as yours will

and we can blow down the streets together

and be stuck in the cracks together

but i won’t help you fight yourself.

if you hate yourself, i have to let you do it alone

on your first moment of being alive
you’ll wonder why god’s in the sky
and how the ***** of your soul
can’t grab hold of the air
to steer you to die
and on your last day you’ll attest
that the plane in your chest
can take the air from your crumpling house
and fly you to god’s bed in the clouds
the clouds will spray and dazzle
with lightning purely designed to unravel
all the twine lashed around your heart
that keeps it form flying out into the dark
of some columbonimbus forest
where the pine trees are black
and you’re only a tourist
through the trillions of droplets of static
don’t panic
you won’t become static
if your being is healthy and your course erratic
through the eclectic college of higher thought
and liar’s losses where
what you said you’d ever do
is who you are and it is you
flowing through your floating soul
far away from your crumpling home
and what you said you’d never do
is who you are and it is you
and it’s flowing through your dying blood
tainted brown with air and mud
and who you are is how you fly with
wings of soul and ***** of lung
piloted by how you die
with tar and drink and merrier things
than you’ve ever known in a crumpling home
because flight is happy and death is euphoric
and falling is a trap sprung by calling for nothing
but concern and disdain will slash at your face
like raindrops cushioning a pilotless plane

I would simply wish to hold you as

the weather holds the day,

as bitterness holds winter with her

effervescent greys.

You would clutch me all to tightly,

then float as if to say,

‘I am air and you are soil,

We love often (not today).’

You would shimmer gently past,

a moment on a breeze;

Our love would be a smoulder,

ashes dying in the eaves.

Or maybe we could push against

complexities of late,

The slow and painful waltz between the lovers,

Love and Hate.

Maybe we would settle, and you’d freeze

a plaster doll;

But I would rather love you like the day,

Fleetingly,

Or not at all.