~this is not an apology, although i owe you many. this is just a story, that will one day be little more than a fragment of a memory.~*

i heard heartbeats under water, and found myself fishing. there was light on a horizon, unmade. stifling change. you, on unimagined shorelines. there was wind through trees, boughs shaking: i, reflected in leaves tumbling. our paws, through leaf-litter and pure chance, met. we were ghosts, hopeless and beautiful.

     the waterline obliges & breathes, though. the walls are
       pristine, and all is coffee-stained and content.

so, an agonist's thoughts, the hands of fate's implausible existence, some ideal named virtue, laid out in beds of unsent letters, touched our lives for one turning moment. there, we were left to swim until we sank, and i drank cold water and thought of you and the sky, and how sometimes our hands are made to feel smaller when both the sun and the moon hang, on tiny strings, intersecting every six months or so.

                or how i could feel nothing had changed, or stayed the same.

     and my hands feel smaller by the day, as
       i watch shadows across the fractions
           of the moon; and guess at how you may
             feel the same, or if you look at all, or
                 what generates these soft mechanisms of hurt.

thus, we set out to measure the earth, one palm's-length at a time, and laugh and ache all the same. and once, you'd said, gently, that i was beautiful, and i got so frightened that i choked. i was so convinced that i'd hurt you. i was so convinced that i was worth so little, and that you'd figure it out. and maybe i did. and maybe you did.

       we sing songs in our heads all the time, though,
       recite one another's words in slow light. and i
       feel less like a ghost, as my shells shrink back
       onto me; but, there are still bits missing that
       branches tore away and sent to you, on the wind.
       we walk right-turning paths, and, as much as
       i try not to tie my footprints up, they remain
       cycles, dirt-trodden through patches of brush; and
       my soles stay as cut-up as my thoughts, and,
       out on endless concrete, i smile unconvincingly and
       squint, as to make out where or what to be.

                                               in dreams, i meet you out on the backfield.
                                        we sit on the fergusson intermediate driveway
                                          and exchange silences, eloquently. in dreams,
                                      we dance and kiss in the hallway and i stop and
                                            remember how nobody's wanted to kiss me
                                         for three years. in dreams, you are gone, out to
                                 sea, and i wonder if i thought this all up and wake,
                               to a dream, where my father is ill but won't admit it,
                                   and has cleaned the walls of the washroom. there,
                   i hide and feel hollow, so sure that nobody will notice; and
                                 realise that my father is always fine and maybe i'm
                                    the one that's ill. i hear your voice, through doors
                                     and halls and continents, and consider that there
                                       are unmeasurable aspects to our shorelines and
                                                             ­                                    psyches and
                                               how i managed to turn out to love you.
                             in dreams, i see my best friend, now not in quotation
                                       marks, and wake and feel stabbing pains in my
                                                chest; a star in the sky for each time i have
                                   crafted abandonment, until the night fills up with
                                        blinding light and, finally, i am clean and pure
                                                   and know nothing, save the warm lap of
                                                        dawn's­ reprieve at the window. i stay
                                                         in place, reeling and absurd
                                               motionless realities playing out on the end
                                                of each fingertip, with your blink-patterns
                                               sin­ging morse through my haze; the entire
                                                          ­ world, folding down to a cascade of
                                                   hurried cries from a small bird, losing its
                                                        nest in the glow. it spreads wings and
                                           claws out from my ribs, and heads north; this
                                                   small bird, called hope, cartwheeling out

                            *to the ends of the earth, where heaven is just
                         a sequence of your most beautiful memories, and
                                   there's you, angel on the oceanside,
                                      dancing within my last breath.