It's all a geometry of soft intersections
This sensation of day and night
Parallels refined and slipstreamed
This map of something you should look like.
I counted the overlays of behaviour,
Buffering anticipations of response
Directions to go here,
Expectations of arrival and coherence,
This palace a studio
To selfie my contentments.
But squint and see the river shimmer unbent
As it was
Before the early brutalities
Before the erosion
Undercutting and redirecting,
Error-building the live wires.
We ended up a lifetime from our origin
foreign to home,
halfhearted and off course,
Truth a desire line
almost forgotten under this tyranny of normal.
We armour up,
a dijk making deltas.
Layers, protections
For the arrows and the undertow.
Veneers of gloss
frost over aspirations
those trapped and those unthawed.
Even the cracks,
humanities regretted,
I'll bandage and hide between short breaths,
Half squinting in the bright,
The hiss and the heavy.
This scurry is the damage
The easy is the weakness.
This inland sea,
Twilit and tideless
becomes surrender unfought
a silting evaporation of potential.
But in the shallows, an honesty found.
Bone naked at the lowest,
an undrowned clarity
reveals mysteries as myth
bleaches ordinary on make-believe
raising, returning faith
my first sacrament.
Up there
On a stone crown
Rubbled with achievement gasps,
Our pilgrim line
Breathless
Overawed
The blistered and the mad
Froze for the photos
Thinking we could stop this time,
Our desperate audacity.
We aimed and earned
Something for someone
Histories, futures muttered enroute
All left to evaporate
Except for the thought of you I breathed out
And breathed in again,
a strengthener for the next.
The snow carried it down
a vapour of relief
a blinding
a forgivable curtain,
if only temporary
then at least knowable
so we wouldn't have to imagine the gaping future
all bristles and cuts
a prediction without comfort
like that handful of snow
already turning caress to claw
as it melts away its romance
a beauty startled
every mothers empty comfort
a curtain rippling in the howl.
a filament warbling
a broadcast of warmth
just what’s needed you said
to keep the dark as a triangle in the corners
where walls meet.
Angles to collect the half-saids and the cold,
more fuel for the pyramid under us
that subsurface of incoherence
the regret almost plumbing to where we started,
but that ember
hostaged and,
feebled and,
flickers on with the courage of sunlight.