Remember when we
cannot remember anymore,
the Sun shining through
windows sealed shut,
when we talk about it
we do not talk about it, we call
it with a different name: aberration.
I cannot remember you anymore
so small and languid in this
life. Everything pales in comparison --
offered by chance, filled with hesitancy
as if obligation, emptied by coming
into the fullness of it, saying it as a plump word
with the same accuracy of knives
tucked within the soft recess of the kitchen
counter that same day, you were different
as any other when we cycled through
Alexandrite Street, the world new again
like we were born in the similar moment
splintered by much less of a force waiting
outside the black gate of the home, and so
much more of a name slipping away
from the cliff of my chafed lip onto your
body's sustained pit, the drop barely an
indent, only as if of limited exertion but
possibly a weight for us to solder
through and through. I told you I could never
indulge into the fray and hold armaments
of it, but twice-told this battle I can
fit in: you, my accoutrement for war,
hallowed you are in excess of flow and march
through rain and light smiling through
opened windows with a blank circle of lightness
that is your face held close and memorized
before taking the commute home, force-equipped
with time's persistent pleading and our
untoward compliance like a reciprocal of stiffness:
you are the wall of your home and I,
a suspended pendulum with a dumb clockhand
     in a stalemate.