You are an upside-down fire. I throw on the damp and send warm signals through the steamy smoke. 
I am sticky and plastic scary, but I am designing myself. We listen to the Big Bang playing the accordion under the winter sky where the stars look like molecules. 
They set forth from their broken palace. He is in a frenzy, knowing his defeat. But you are still stormy weather, and I dream on about my slipping pride.
I am saw and hammer and twilight ideology. United we all spin in circles, eroding with hunger. He drinks a barbaric escape to pass the time.
She waves to him from the shore. And you live in an uninhabited place, while I hunt minotaurs. Oh, well. I’m forgetting myself again.
Plump sails push us across this vast pantomime. Nine saved stitches couldn’t save us.
He laughs, more often by himself, about the dance of illumination, and she looks at you for support.
We anticipate the meaning of this glove-puppet show. Only faintly aware, we walk away from the two of them. You tell me you think they are laughing at us.
But I tell you it doesn’t matter because you are an internal scheme, and one with a weight of paper in your house enough to collapse the foundations.
I shift like sands beneath tides, and he has heart and spirit and might even own a gun.
My design continues, and I realise it’s been a while since I saw another person.
You bump into her friend in public who tells you we’re all going by the wayside.
Drooping blooms of love-lies-bleeding were growing in the park when you ran into each other, but today the clouds aren’t breathing, and I can smell compost.
He and I meet for aromatic laziness, researching some long-time-ago magic-before-science.
All of us walked this street through the dusty ruins and burlesque bars. Then you arrive with your persistent language.
Then she intersects with her mother’s point of view, but not entirely, and comes to the conclusion that the two of you must have shared her secret in the park that day when you met amongst the flowers.
And I tell you like I always do that you shouldn’t worry, because you are no one’s possession, and you carry time in a paper bag.
And our proximity to each other offers a kind of privacy I have felt no other place. Especially as all of them seem to watch constantly.
So we listen to the wounded self-analyse to pass the time again. They arrive at last, bearing gifts and curses. And now summer’s gone what can we do but accept?
I am hook, line, sinker and stolen bait.
He finds some kind of equilibrium.
The thread-thin blade sliced the intermingled silence. Earth’s blood quenches thirst.
She is still waving from that shore. Defeated, he trudges home alone. We walk away, deliberately deaf, dumb and blind.
Dirty rags bind fresh scars. You tell me they don’t always heal.
Your mutual friend winds up living through an allergic reaction.
Neighbours move in to your uninhabited place, and his broken palace has been mended upon his return.
He places his drink on the table and says softly, “We’re no longer friends.”
I woke up today with a fading vision of enchantment, but when I tell you, you say the sequence of events is inconsistent.
I say, “Hah!” And I tell you you must be wrong because you are a tide, and even though you recede, the moon still pulls you.
But you are the sun too, and that’s what I fail to see, and you point that out to me immediately.

For M.

First published in "Selection" 2018.