ir a principal |
Ir a lateral
and may the slightest light start a fire
take up these someone other's signals in the smoke,
consider them whispering away
may the clouds fold unto the carpet fibres,
cause heaven to roll into bedrooms
and hold everything that gravity's only thinking of keeping down
there.
the inside worms climbing trails
where i imagined trees and canopies,
there are no birds there;
they feel safer where they can't be picked at
along they drag
swallowed emotions in stone
they scrape, rake,
i pay them less attention
and wait for the slightest light to blaze between my shoulders
it's come to this
the way that towers push against the ground
to be tall
is a little misunderstanding,
but let me fold a corner on that one
so i can come back to it
if my chest were a ballroom floor,
then there have been steppings and creaks all through
into my chandelier neck;
the air thicked with skirts waving,
pirouettes,
gazes across the room holding on to my ribs.
purple, elegant, glimmering masks
sprawling around pairs of isles
trying to archipelago
trying to ginger through the tectonics
of my organelles,
flooded with the music of several hearts beating.
the music has kept
asking for a hand
the music has kept
a hand on my shoulder
a hand on my hip
a hand in my clasp
a head on my breast
the string of my eyes stretching and stretching 'til i can really see
the yarn in front of me being spun
and the cat getting tangled
on its back
pawing at the towering air
a few years ago, i learned honesty
was not a noun to be adjectivised,
but a state to be verbed,
and more than that, to be lived
as a continuous stretch
(what else is upgrowing)
so in an intuitive impulsive address to life,
i stated
that i would hereby want to be bad at lying
in order to surrender all my secrets,
(unwanted toys i know were teaching me bad habits)
one by one
they left my coffers,
sometimes by my handing them over to embracing hands,
othertimes by clutching fingers pulling at snapping threads,
yet moretimes by no transaction of my own,
but by my standing outside castle walls, rained upon,
watching the stones wet
as my clothes soak and my clutchings slide out
from underneath my clever fabrics,
damp and discontraptioned.
despite the weather, i'd repeated to myself that
it was worth losing my patchwork playthings
since they would never satisfy
(despite their promises otherwise)
a few years later,
i have a parent who makes sure my head
is facing the sea,
even in front of the yawning waves,
even when i thrash about
tattooing emotions on my cheeks and corneas,
looking for surfaces to glance at me,
so that i can catch me looking back
the glimpse is of a pair of pupils
dilating, taking in the wordless
brushes of open eyes.
this opening
allows me to feel stitchless and gaping,
the outbreaths of a hundred people filling
it
and the strange sound
of their swimming irises
doing laps over me
every day
i have gotten to wear a clock face
instead of my own.
my hands are tied to one another
telling the timelessness of it all,
all a little wander
every day
the outbreaths of a hundred people
bubble into the space of me
they refract
they squeeze
and they burst,
they leave me standing in their oxygen,
a swirling bend in the atmosphere
the skin off your emotions
slides
like slips of ink into blots
there are pages of condensation
troubled by the pressed prints
of your fingers
in the book of us
we wrote a poem,
touching
at the corners
we wrote letters
to the dust to gather
we wrote that a thought be
shut into the binding
so that when it opens,
the covers would hold
what is there in me
in the hallucination pushing at the ground
in the teeth barring in words
that resonates,
that stirs
at the string in the someones around me
ties them in naughts,
fiddles with a few cells here and there
triggers reactions
they are all watching for my earth
to spin,
to catch at orbiting debris,
to circle about what they really want to be closer to
a hole in the fabric of their sorts
