to hold a photograph in my hand
  and believe what is presented,
  take is at it already is – why not?

if I close my mind’s shuttering eye,
will you be as candid as before?
unrestricted, unsorted from the hullaballoo,

you, freer than what is imagined, closing
in like a bullet from yesterday shot out
of the sky’s contrived clearing –

to hold a photograph in my hand
and tug closer by the mouth of the fringe
as if to pour water on a broken glass,

slithering now, a shadow of moon
at the very dull end of my cup;
you are closer than any rehearsed moment

ready to catch the inner canthus of the eye:
this relentless picture-passing, tense and
fervent, avid like bankiva to air,

water to chrysanthemum: behind thick shrub
of crepuscular, an arboreal locomotion
shatters loose, your frantic figure.

to hold a photograph in my hand
and size it down to the dimensions
of this home – there is potential in this

comparison: flaring out like smoke from
where it infinitely burns, I seek an ache
and hence place a finger to shush,

to hold this photograph in my hand
and confabulate a soft blow to the gut
and feel it realer than any dagger or berretta

held at one’s life-edge: this delusory intimation,
a slipshod work of feeling. to feel it rejoin
me somewhere I ought to be back again.

duckling
in return for pity i offer you these
meagre meals:
my heart, substantial not to breathe from my chest but the offer will suffice.
bitten down nails -
stained confectionery colors, a brittle bone penance
stuffed thick cartilage
watery canthus
pure blood and guts that once held me upright.
I can only pray you'll forgive that I know
these choice cuts are not enough.

She was simply there,
An incarnation of herself.
No longer a nexus of adjectives
But pure and present noun.
I noticed the little fine hairs on her legs,
A speck of sleep in the canthus of her eye.
No longer Our lady of the Enigmas, but a girl,
Just a girl.
And somehow by being suddenly there like this
She made the things around her be there too.
In her, and in what she spoke, the world,
The little world in which we sat.
Found it’s grounding and was realised.
It was as if she had dropped a spreading drop of colour
Into the water of the world and the colour had spread
And the outlines of things had sprung into bright relief.
As I sat with my mouth open
And listened to her, I felt everyone
And everything shiver and shift, falling into the most vivid of forms
Detaching themselves from me and my conception of them.
And changing themselves instead into what they were
No longer figment, no longer mystery,
No longer a part of my imagining.
And I, I was there amongst them, at last.

The lacrimal caruncle
swells with blistering feeling,
flooding out the medial canthus.
It streams down the nasion,
dancing over the pinken,
inflamed to a roaring raw cheek.
Landing on dirtied and tore cloth,
used with the moisture to wipe
all the dust away from every memory,
even when it's possibly too late.

Now there is hardly anything
to be discovered in all of this.
You have done a decent job,
your hands are tired from it all.
Weak and brittle,
you still know now.
You know it could go every single way wrong,
it could be a waste of time,
it could hurt you beyond any kind of repair.

But you know.
You know it's him.
You know it will always be him.
It will always be him
that you wish to lay beside,
it will always be him
that you want to feel,
it will always be him
that you feel everywhere you go.
It will always be him.