A structure, enthralled by despair, like a body, like a series of bodies. A push. this body, against that body, against all bodies, until all the light is out…

I am saying this to the room, in slow motion. stitching one piece of time to another and another. She’s not here. In this time or the other.

*

(All these pale resurrections, folded– one by one, into space.)

The Light of The World, drained until all that remains is amnesia. This.

 We sing beyond or we dilate into nothing.

spun out absences gathered hand over hand to plug the holes.

First, let me explain about the blood,” he said. He kept saying. This was the explanation:

In Autumn we learned of the disappeared states. Routes of departure closed. They were bombing. Who was bombing? They were. The roads were closed. The rain came and we drowned.

*

Live in that black disaster,  brackish water filling the boots, with your breath quicken before it fails. Pulled up   out   and a   part, limb by limb: snapping the cold air, as if it were nothing.

*

“Everyone here is so ruthless.” Says our ghost, as it wanders into frame, it is lonely, and its eyes are nothings.

“Describe your rate of decay on a scale of eons,” it says to us. “Do you understand?

I’ve not found another way to do it just yet. Here, let me sprinkle some of this blood on the ground.

*

Over the horizon: A machine made of birds   listing, then sinking.

(could I follow you there?)

*

         If

I could pick one point in all the constellations of time     It

would not be this one. Or that

glistening shock of gold folded into   some

pocket.   Out of place.             Here: find me levitating

on the corner

*

If we could go anywhere we could go here: Outside the structures but yet inside the frame. It’s all shadow here. one flickering out into another one risen.

It’s an ache.

I am, for days on end, ridden out to the edge of things. Blunted by despair.

*

The constellation of the body. Bare   out of season, stretched out over the horizon, over these mountains older than bone.

She wakes to find the smallest places in her overflowing. Gaps in the fade.

I wanted to write something useful, but all I’ve found is this:  The wrack and shuffle of language. How it is all pushed into this one, tiny thing.

If I could slip it into the fade, the hole in the nothing, and swallow it for you, or suck it out from your body like a sliver and hold it up for some sun to dissolve. What would be left?

I know the ash of this: How, once smudged or drawn over the body, it conceals the burial. How we move, thick with grief, over the plains of our interiors, how we chase some horizon of bone.

If anything can be made of it. Pieces here and there, all ephemera in their shapes, yet something always remains. A ring, or a smudge of grief

*

You can see it float down in the smoke from the fire

punctuated here and there by bullet holes,

by grief,

by history, and the compound fractures of its gaze.

Here we bleed out, and stuff our wounds– inch by inch, with nothing.

*

A damn against the motion of history. The mute compulsion of the body. boundaries drawn on the skin:

This wasn’t the first time, no. Half the people in this play don’t even know a god is dying. What are they doing with it? I can’t see the stage. There’s a man folding his hands into a shirt. All the flowers are on fire, and feathers floating down from the cracks in the ceiling.

It’s difficult at this stage in our decline to see anything. 

these robust claims of certain implausibility.

Everywhere rain stuck to the inside of a cloud. this cloud. here.

In my hands. Can I slide it across the floor to you?

Can we sit here, dazed in sunlight, and forget about our hands?

 Can you press me into the earth, deep and rich? If only for a day.

*

Here. Where everything expands into moonlight or smoke. Those are your choices. I am here, expanding the air, abandoned in hope of a twin. someone to stuff your pain into. Have I ever discovered this land? your body is mapped out in one long breath.

*

The eventuality of our departure . here in our afterlife. I am a foreign city, listing somewhere in the middle of the map. the geography of the body. It’s temperate zones. It’s nationalism. How it supersedes the mind, unlocking bit by bit the tissue that binds it. Have you seen the Northern Territories? Have you seen the refugees? There is a line somewhere. Have you been dragged across it? kicking and screaming. Have I seen you there, in the pale horizons behind your eyes where I list, from time to time, settling to your floor. Everything here is shrinking. Our bones are just compacted dust blown out to the edges of the map.

*

Back from the land of the ten thousand things

for my birthday I came up on the shore like driftwood

I’d been asleep

under this speck on your map

dreaming down into the earth

translating the soil inch by inch

into a new epoch

I’ll paint my skeleton in your moonlight

and drift asleep on your ocean

until all is silence

until we are picked clean.

*

To ground the unground in being

Sometimes in the dirt

below

sometimes lilting in the air

sometimes a certain slant of sunlight

illuminates the body

where the churn spills out over

your edge

Where I can trace the horizon of bone

to your shore.

If we could meet there

and collapse into one another

something like a

*

All the maps of Asia

All the rivers, pulled up by their root and drained back into some

sky

above you

There is no use for this, to be placed hand by hand back into the

ground

Or parceled out piece by bloody piece

until nothing on the map remains

except a name at the edge

faded with (r)age.

Where could we meet then?

(After the world is burnt out)

under the excrement of some sky.

All the archipelagoes of your body

connected by this thread of hope.

I can trace it from point to point

with a finger. I can name all the entrance and exit

wounds

a constellation of grief

of longing.

What would we name it?

*

Lost in a century

run-out and threadbare

I am curled up on your shoreline.

waiting

waiting for some thing to rise out of the sea

for something to happen

for you to wake and show me

that place on the map

where you begin.

*

Our secret war:

how we tumbled out onto the beach

expecting rain

only to find the sky everywhere with birds.

I am dreaming our secret history.

Worn down to a nub

hands clawing at the sand for something

like cover, a place to wait

until the water reclaims us.