She stands still over the tectonic fracture
between the love divined through a song lyric
and the disappointment felt in the immediacy
of familiar faces; love as some sterile function.
Tightened gauze over a worried stranger's head,
she tends to the Troubled as a rock garden:
arranging immovable boulders to a sea of pebbles,
opal textures and softened hearts come as a result
of her well-practised, beckoning smile.

She causes grown men to sing at their guitars,
turgid chorus and muttered longings for completion.
An imagined sight: her hair falling in waves
and eddying the islands of arousal across her
heaving, welcoming lungs. In truth, it had been
years since she had given herself to anyone,
more letting out her property for those that she
is obliged to love, and feel love in return.

She collects flowers and fruits in her mind's orchard,
in those spaces between phone calls and the eyes
that follow her strides during tired lunch breaks.
A mindful stupor has overcome her way of living
to the point that life is a procession of duties,
or truths only confided after the fourth glass of wine.
She stands still in the wake of her condition.
The way troubles gravitate into galaxies of doubt,
the way she hides beneath a polluted sky,
stood at the point I blindly stumble towards.