Beneath the spectral haze,
you can have the luxury—
you can reify—
build the aching architecture of touch
from smoke and a smattering of scattered glass.
You’ll be right,
or at least, you\'ll be something.
Beads of savage tears
erode that careful veneer,
and the seasons, mercurial tyrants of enslavement
impose their crowns of frost and bloom.
We served their circles, many times
accelerating now,
caught in this torus of fermented time,
spinning through spinning
out of our control
intoxicating yet sober
mocking the innocence
where sweetness sours
and the air tastes of distant memories,
and entropy gets its partial feast.
Then, we laid bricks of sunlight and hay
before shadows came, fractious, to fracture them.
Value equals pricelessness,
pricelessness equals a ledger entry
in the weaponised panoply.
Lover, do you miss those days before
my hopes came knocking at your door?
Do you remember the scene?
Late summer heat, curtains half-closed—
sunlight pooling on the bed
where we loved, careless with time,
dust, anarchic in its slow, lazy dance.
Your kiss broke the moment.
And something like a promise
bloomed and vanished between us.
You were both ghost and hand,
both the fire that burns and the smoke that lingers
forever to resist time’s breeze.
Did we pass this place long ago,
or is this just the feeling—
a shadow cast
from another life,
another dream,
another -
ghost of a moment unmade?
Was there love, or the shadow of wanting?
What’s the price of time?
Work out the return:
is their profit in the brakeless train,
the leaking boat.
That’s the horizon pulling away
as if the world itself abandons us.
And still, you stand on the precipice,
half-formed notion, half-decided-
half-forgotten,
but never by me,
waiting to step into form.
What shape will you take?
A tear in the fabric,
a seam sewn too tight
or the echo of your kiss, soft at my throat?
Reify.
Become.
Erode me, unmake me—
and in doing so,
make me whole.