i.
it is the saddest thing in the world when you suddenly find yourself loving someone you were once in love with.


ii.
i am grieving.  when i cried in flight my eyes were so loud the birds heard them.  i had it all planned out, what i was to say if they asked – death in the family – because one way or another, it was true.  but they never looked; never spoke.   perhaps my sorrow is less potent than gravity.  it has no force of its own but for the currents that swallow me whole and spit me at the sea, disdainful of my state.

i am dying, because i cannot fly.


iii.
i am in a place where the flowers have not died and the trees are pea-soup green always, but there is no such spring in my heart.  though your trees be bare and bearing all the ravens, i cannot see into my branches and all the birds are hiding from me.  when i call for them, they make for a sky i cannot reach.


iv.
i am lily-skinned and holding back all the things i do not want you to see because i have already stripped myself of words for you.  i am sullen in the mornings but most alive at night when the dark that has stolen all the secrets from my sleep returns my dreams to me, and my hope has a longevity of unknown origin.  anything you say is not enough.  not enough to kill me.


v.  
i have my breath cranked up to full volume but i always forget that you are miles over the ocean that the wind of my lungs cannot breach.  you cannot feel me on your skin; you cannot see me.  you cannot hold me in your arms because i am too light, too slight a touch to be understood.  you cannot keep me because we belong nowhere.  


vi.
you always think that you will die alone.  i hate that negative space that stutters like a missed step and


vii.
i am both here and there. i am suspended between two states, between two hearts – both my own – and for the first time i cannot commit this to paper.  i cannot let myself see the finality of being in between, cannot choose which way to be because my heart has auricles but she cannot hear me weep.  she can only write oracles of my history and all i can decipher from her inflection now is that her chords and tendons are maladied, her walls ruffled.  this needs straightening before it translates into something vital.


vii.
i tell you we may walk alone, but i will walk beside you.  sometimes i don’t think you hear me because your smile dissolves into the space between us and the motes fall between my fingers, lost.  you are walking alone but you cannot see me, you cannot feel the hand that is always reaching for you.  you cannot feel me calling, waiting.  longing.


viii.
i know now that i am not yours not because i am not enough, but because i am too early.


ix.
there is a minute of our time trapped in an hourglass too small to contain us.  we are a moment; a moment spent trying to decipher the depths of our irises, these flowers starred with pollen pouring my feeling into the arms of the wind.  it dislodges the birds; they are colourless blooms fleeing the trees, all shadow and light to these eyes that do not know colour.

we are a blossom waiting for december’s deathly kiss.  we are a flash full of syncopated breathing.  we are saturday sun shining over scented skin, a photograph of the perpetual movement in waking alone.  we are a forgotten thought that has slipped behind a grey haze; always irretrievable.  

we are forfeit.


x.
my breathing is laboured.  it is giving birth to new air and the clouds around me are sodden with the age of water and the weight of sky.  i am here in atlas’ absence but i cannot hold up the world, for you make me weak.


xi.
i can make a minute last longer when i agitate the hourglass for the sand does not know where to fall.  its rest is uncertain.  the sound of broken glass does not destroy the virginity of this enchantment, but the sand seeps from my fingers and runs with my blood to a place where it cannot be found.  i have learned that a minute is only as pliant as my ability to make you love me, and so i let myself fall with the fragments.


xii.
i leave the orchestration of your descent to the static sand ticking the heartbeats down to an implosion.  i am a paper crane too small to hold hope; i am folded into myself because nothing lies flat now.  the terrain of the land we wrecked is turbulent in your exhalation, and when i inspire i am full of you.  i am undulating with the earth that is beating with my blood for i have been bleeding since the day i met you.  i am holding my breath because i want to keep you, but air is dearer to me than you are.  every breath costs me a drop that daubs the dark like ink on wet paper, and the colour of my yearning is diffuse; substanceless now and always.


xiii.
i can only love you.