I have walked this earth a thousand times.
Dirt. A loose aggregate of particles, held together by gravity, and moisture.
Rain. Water suspended. Resurging. Cascading in plumes, like sheets of smoke.
Sky. Blue. Stretched like canvas. Abstract. Nowhere. Everywhere.
I exist. Here. Standing. Thinking.
I am dead. I am being born.
I am existing across all time and space, but I do not know it.
At this moment, I am trapped. I am unconscious. I am unaware.
I have walked this earth a thousand times, and cannot even remember.
Because it has not happened. Has yet to happen. May never happen.
Future. A nonexistence on the horizon.
Hope. An ache. A nothing replaced with nothing.
Misery. The wretched face in the mirror.
A child wears my eyes. She drifts through life.
Scared. Alone. Free.
She plays in the forest. Her small, sap-covered hands grasp branch after branch.
She enters intermediate school. Is called freak. Is judged by her skin, her eyes.
She realises she is different for the first time.
Alien. Deviant. Other.
Her eyes fill with self-hatred.
I have watched this moment a thousand times, yet can do nothing.
Disintegration. The act of separation.
Loneliness. A billion strangers condemned to live together.
Existence. A billion billion billion particles, shifting beneath my flesh.
There is no death that can end my being.
I have felt the atoms of my past collide, and spark into biology.
I have felt the atoms of my future shred like fractals, spiralling into a dim, dark nothingness.
I have felt all this, and none of it.
From infinity I came, to infinity I’ll go. Forever cycling in the pantomime of existence.
This pretend construct of space and time.

'Tell me a story', she said and I said,
go to bed it's late, but wait,
here's a tale about a place called 'Windscale'
but they don't call it that anymore since they had that problem with the nuclear core.

I wish there were fish off the Cumbrian coast or at most some colours other than grey,
back in the day before they set up the plant when the sea was fertile and the fishermen would perspire and pant as they pulled in the catch it was a fine place to be,
then they killed off the sea,
dead!

'Tell me a story', she said,
I cried me a river instead.

In the scale of A or B
I come in at number three and
my time's caught short like an
incontinent man, so
you **** your pants, but you carry the can?
obviously,
if you have a tin to **** in that's what you do.


The tincan, **** poor man now there's a moniker to tinker with.

At fifty nine,
I've had some time to ponder on and pontificate, to  moan about the state we're in, to carry the can and one spare tin and yet no time at all in the scheme of things which brings me back to A or B, I wonder which and where the number three came in.

I build a maze to amuse and it confuses my sense of direction, here over there, do a right back to where and my time's caught up with me,
I need a ***.

I could not be with you so I became you.

he has the look of a woman with a place to die. he grounds my father with a sickness reserved for flying creatures. he owns nothing. his people are a hospital my mother calls one too many. his prayers replenish absence. he counts in the garden an invisible populace whose dreams my dreams were having.

I sat and listened
wondering if it was
the music,
the lyrics,
or you giving it to me,
that made it my favourite.
I can't recite a line or note,
so maybe that's my answer.

I would have waited for you
if you had said
something.
I would have waited for you
if you had said
anything
other than
nothing.