I'm not there when it happens,
I pass by later to see red
and brick and rubble
much later actually
there's already a shrine of sorts
a bus-shelter shape, not even
half-filled
with tacs, the odd photos, a shoe -
these people three, I don't recognise them
it was the thing not the people
that fell, but when it fell and
as it fell more than bodies got
crushed

In which Carson unties my tongue...

“I'm not explaining this right. What happened was this. There were these beautiful feelings and loose little pleasures inside me. And this woman was something like an assembly line for my soul. I run these little pieces of myself through her and I come out complete. Now do you follow me?”
~ Carson McCullers - 'A Tree, a Rock, a Cloud'

a night without

a night without
a slide back through time, to a peach-fizz yesterday bereft of cymbals and carnival-seeking
it's a hollow half-pillow hug and a curl not quite the right circumference
a Magellan of the daylight to map my restlessness
and in the swelter a brief fly singed between a black plane
beyond a river not meant for swimming
and a here when found, a trial

Her here

So I've home to the here here and the you here and the not here - and the documents you left; a hat on the wrong chair, matching sneakers (pink for casual runs), these crumbled sheets...I don't know what tomorrow brings, it must be full of certainties - faint ruffles, our yawning deep such that we've no solution but to love. This method, well I call it living and now you've departed, there's this gap - a heaving arch my sole bed - so now the you here, not here, tonight makes even leaves have secrets and the my here ache to know

the divine comedy

So I've bullet-holes up my sleeve and yet, the tricks ring false in the sweet arena of our new youth - and when I to you (that disappearing but sings) and ask why this me - you smile all arch and fringe and beauty, pop and olive and hold me till I quiver