holdover from the air cools bitter awash of dark and a turning horizon without centre. where i entered an empty frame across distance and skin like smoke. ive been having nightmares of cosmic terror a sublime loss of control like paper tearing in the chaotic drifts of broken eddies and other everyday things an inward open mirror a sunlit line wavering to heat disintegration dispersal erosion and death. ive been reading uncanny fluctuations in the sign of things in a power too great and sparse to comprehend overwhelmed by haunting finitude as time veers into collision and the fleeting panic of yesterdays blood. i find myself shaking at the thought of contact the electromagnetic law of repulsion built into the fabric of my flesh eyes turned away like a promise all language from dead stars. dragged along these orbits my skin trembles and i am hateful. faces blur in passageways half-lit rooms smudge across the surface of my memory until i see nothing but the colour of what was tightening the cords of my ribs stumbling inflexion. in the precession of traffic light blurs through my sleeve and i realise i was invisible all along and that i did this to myself and that nobody can help me and that i did this to myself and that i will retreat further and further and further because if it hurts to be abandoned it hurts more to be approached and misunderstood. the masks the words the acts the plays and beneath it all fear cruel mounting hopeless wretched fear eyes turning fingers running over and over until they break the lines of my face a *******. i turn the clocks upside down. i take the batteries out of all my electronic devices. i break the locks on my door. only then does morning come.