On the creaking wooden chair in the corner, hanging on the scaffold, in the circular mirror, distorted and twisted and folding. It stands in the shadows. It lurks in the school playground while parents wait for their children, it’s a runaway train, and it’s the ink streaming down the window pane, it’s the clock melting inwards.
its golden fluidity and baby blue subtleties.
It’s the reason why you wake in the middle of the night,
gasping into darkness and grappling with loose ends... it was just a dream.
The reason you turn a corner just to look back behind you, why you double-take in the mirror, question where did I go?
Looking at nothing, staring into the bleak dark, it lurks. Awaits.
It waits in the form of a child holding a red balloon, staring into our blind spots.
Like shadows, when the sun rotates away from behind the playground wall you know, just then, now, in that full circle...
it’s about to run out.
You bend over backwards to relate to the moonlight dancing on the floor of its own reflections. It shows itself on beer bottles from better nights, you cross one leg over the other, position yourself,
folded linen.
Rushing to endless deadlines for nowhere o’clock, last call for the runaway train, struggling with human concepts.
You’re simply a sum of parts: an addition of flesh, limbs, old and broken battered bones, blind spots.
All the places you can’t see, can’t feel, can’t reach.
Loose ends meet themselves in the corner of that same old dusty room,
the folded linen crumples to the floor,

the red balloon bursts.