Clock face

Still, flat hands
tick time away-
filling up boxes,
making empty space.

I don't know this form
and who it is for.
only stay and still
wait and count
the passing clouds
each passing hope-

hope for time, hope none is waste
hope whatever it is was worth the wait

but then there is more time
and there is more space.

It's a long time to look and see
only one flat, still clock face.

One of those days

It seems, somehow I've grown into the grown-up shoes

and I don't know when I grew

because only last week I was still seventeen

but today I'm twenty-two. 

Unheard of

Here's what I have learnt about the phonetics of loss.

They sound something like this:

(which is to say, silence)

it's a note I've never heard anyone sing

and it's note that someday I will find, 

come morning, sleep has left behind.

This sound, like those in an old lullaby

until found, I can know only as goodbye,

as milkteeth underneath a cotton pillow,

as the sounds that I hear now:
(the black bedtime echo).

One of many

A stumble first, one of many, but then the thin-thin-
thinking-ridiculous-manic-hideous-and-forgot-
ten times as bad as it used to be, as it was be-
four times as loud as your in-
tension headaches, and those other pain-
fulfilling nothing so you really can't com-
plain and simple, nothing all that spec-
shall we try again, once over? Try a sec­ond t-
I'm not enough, I don't think, to  be some-
one stumble, this one time, another time, and it's one of many.

Blind spot.

For a moment, fastened at the bus window,
I consider what living without windows would be like.
On the other side suddenly there is an infinity,
the street is paved with star-stone, dust matters are astral
and I am wondering where on earth in the universe I am.

He told me that a moment asts ninety seconds
but it was gone and the grey came again
before I could count, before a blink or a beat
of heart or of hands, so I don't think
I can say I have really looked for what I would miss,
the sights most treasured by my sore eyes,
or really given blindness a moment's thought.