the location of person:
unstable, seemingly solid:
here: where streets
seem short term
ideas: layers of sketches,
drawn nightly in windows, and talk,
gesture, all offshoots
of space: degrees
of speed
and slowness,
new and old
possibilities: the turn
and return:
there: the bench
where in a strange, cluttered
day, the coordinates
of self converging
on solitude, but decentered,
essentially
in-between: the trains
stammering in, sudden shifts
of tiredness: squinting
by the bright, small light
in the eye’s window: sat
between, under
rewritten skylines,
permanently unfamiliar:
the small pressure
of a hand,
a warmth, dissipating:
disconnected, an awareness
undid itself subtly: the letter
of her black hair, read
from great
height: by the fruit market, cats
paused in garbage: absently
eyeing one late
commuter: lost
in the wrong speed
in the window of the word,
briefcase diminished
to stamp size, open
mouthed, still running:
*
the location of a body: extant
in language, but snatched
from awareness
the city distracts:
as, seeming to eat, rereading
letters at a Vicrail
unfolding table, with shadow
of ink, leaning
in air and thirst, larger
than the lost words, looking
up for water or friendship,
in the unripe
spaces between
the sun:
the hand: blank,
enfolding ticket stubs
to a heaven of neon
dust, a white, sunless
country of phantom names,
where the words are flat
on flatness:
treading on silence
as though on ice: lonely
for first love, or the raw glow
of lamps in water:
watching, fading,
a world burnt down to itself,
each thought: an untidy kernel
of gold, flaring
on the distilled, colourless
hour where, visible,
fidgeting with unlit
cigarettes, uneasy in sleep
or sleepless: the sudden
airlessness in
the sealed outline
of permanence: a city
no longer
simplified: inaccessible
as death, and so photographic,
as momentum pulls world
out from under, tears
from sight:
*
the location of a persona:
it doesn’t last
past knowing:
with all the slow
illegibility of your nightlit
skin, the moment
when the body
walks off the edge
of the sentence: vanishing
into the unreadable
flesh-book
of sleep: and taking
in hand, the letter,
in which unreadable
cities occlude
with lines, all knowledge
not only of death, but of bread
and words:
