in the absence of myself
in my failure to correspond please read not
between those lines you seem to see
painted stark white on your road
for they have been laid down by your hand
and so they don’t exist in my terrain

or perhaps they stretched out always
rivering around nook and rock
obscured by those places
that don’t know the clocks in your quadruple-time universe
and despite the vicinity of the same sun
which causes such spin
from a trajectory I didn’t know I was part of
i was amputated
a glitch in orbit,
a piece of dumbly-iced flotsam that found itself
awed, though not always
and this perceived complacency sank me
from knee-deep to neck
in a matter of syllables and presumptions
left me to incubate and tongue a newly-hatched mythology of another
uphill into the airless

call me Cassandra, call me Sisyphus, call me at a loss
never call me frivolous
know there wallows no such luxury in all that space

believe not the smile i was cursed with
it’s old starlight, chiseled into the night of me
sometimes it’s the only light to see by

believe not my words which are the ghosts of pleasure
spoken into vacuums
locked as I am into the absence of myself

these last gyrations of seasons I’ve given and gained
rolled more off my edges
than my soul can weigh up against a gouge of mountains
or the greyed sound of a decision’s roll to the bottom
whittled to a good old
infinitely
condensed
nothing

and still it strikes the bottom
flinting
waking a fire so deeply slept
my eyes mute your words

it’s enough that we write
that we are plumbed and underlit
by the same source.
all else i jettison – or forget to
has little to do with you

dear stone, dear fuse of fire,
dearest muse of spark and loss and exchange
this

this wild, waking light is all the orbit I need.