your eyes and the pour of time
through my breached defences
i am uncertain of my edges now
aware of the mixing swirl
of a cosmos in which we are the dance
of endless restless smallness
we are the coalescence of waveforms
mingling in a glance
itself embroiled in the everything
a sharing of the tales light tells
a charge, a spark in the shadows
like the bunched duvet
you left behind to haunt me
memory of wood
sucked dry by the thirsty flames
left ghost, a haunting
shaped from the fire's soft grey tears
collapses empty
beneath the settling structure
we carefully built
later i'll make the spare bed
leave ours your lost body's cave
fuzzy-edged distortion
your hands warm in my hands
we breathe across the sky
foraging for dreams we misplaced
and forgot the flavours of
drift smoke-light across dusks
each more heartbreakingly beautiful
singing tales soft
we hope and fear are heard
and dread hearing bounced back
from uncaring slabbed dullness
we dissolve and fizz
edges like ash exhilarating
in spin and drift
sometimes it's easier to hold on
than it is to see you
it's not - it can't be
yet somehow is
we laugh but shy, as if someone adult
might take it from us -
the moon perhaps, though she's allied
to lovers, traditionally - or some lurker,
hedged, patient, primed to spring
we both carry that fear bonewise,
running the body's rivers
seared in the deep red meat of us
how even if we get this moment that's not
but somehow is, somehow it isn't,
and won't, can't, mustn't be, or ever have been
shake your made money
jingle pockets full of change
but for all your wealth
and haunted machinery
there will always be
a kid with dried gourds on sticks
filled with sun-dried seeds
dancing the rain of pummelled
skins stretched on wood frames
weaving patterns of counter
and pulse, free, beyond your claws
such ordinary
ambitions - for cold gold's gleam
and fire rolling free
embellishing night's edges -
tattered scales glinting
beneath moss centuries deep
as if your slow dreams
seeped through lazy armour
to cosset you deep,
deeper into forgetting
absent, avoiding
the way the world failed to match
your terrible majesty