summer breeze froze in winter's bite
bed empty,
night stifling.

a dry bough cracks at numb sunrise
night endured,
now day's trifling.

The debating circuit

In debates at school we despised extreme statements.
Just a single example would disprove them: no need for skill at all.

By college, to prove All A is B was the true measure of worth.
We set ourselves to complex and nuanced reasoning
Why A must be B
—whether A wished to be B, knew she was B, or showed any sign of being B,
Or not—
We marshalled History, Economics, Politics and Society
To confirm it. Who could withstand that terrible nexus?

Certainly not the adjudicator.
How clever we have been, here is the trophy to prove it.

How dull were those who resented debate on the grounds that
A isn't, after all, B, and
That we didn't think it important to know it
When we could simply argue.

Cartography

Missing something is writing a note in a blank space on a map. Leaving it blank is too much to bear; besides, we don't know what to do with ourselves then. A map of my life would be worth drawing; for one, it would be reassuring, because everything is there- all at once and without effort.
Here, on the hill, my castelo de san joao, complete with high fences and gargoyles on guard, and a little girl practising their faces out a window. Below, on the riverbank, twisting little dingy streets with bookshops and assorted alleyways where poets and the thinking sort stroke their chins at corners and stoke their fires in pretty reasonable cafes. Drifting aimlessly down the water reaches you eventually to the sea, past thickets teeming with undiscovered specimens of dubious emotional stability and adaptability to thought à la mode. Strewn among rock and sand along the seashore will be the comfortable huts: of indifferent quality and invisible to the discerning eye. There's quite a settlement of them, but all soggy at high tide. From there if one raises his head and looks, there is a steeple far inland, ringing its invitation.
The land is different here, rolling and green to the eye (for the Lord is a shepherd, is he not?) and every outcrop might hide multitudes, but there's no one to be seen around. And this is the rule: One never does know about what the others do. Away to the West there is a carnival always running, raucous music and dancing lights and marshes of half-dried liquids that wink in the low light and surprise you.
And running beneath and across all this are the soils, teeming with life and yet invisible, speaking a language that hours of talking transplantation have not taught me. And so there, at the very edge of the known world, a collaborative project of archaeology and mining, so that both the soil we excavate and that which we must leave untouched may have value, humans and machines and all the rest holed up together in a pile of hope and discovery— over there, out of the way, so only a bit of dust will get onto everything else.

something afoot.

Mothers kiss babies’ feet because they’ve never yet touched the ground.

Lovers kiss lovers’ feet because nothing could drag those feet into the dirt.

Look down; radially from your feet the world extends; 

Take care they never run out from under you.

monologue

"What's it like, long distance?"


 Long-distance? Oh just, you know...

...A vital line stretched to screaming...

With internet and Whatsapp and things...

..The scream disperses—mid-throat, mid-call, mid-Hold on, someone's calling let me check'…

And we're so rushed these days...

…I feel the agony of hours when a text isn't returned, maybe not even seen…

People keep telling us we're the couple they're pinning their hopes on (haha)…

…All our irony can't save us from expectations, theirs or our own…

But yeah, honestly, I think it's good. Gives us our space, you know?

…The spaces of texts unsent, stored as drafts, to be sent at any time...

documentary

In the old films, the heroes make exaggerated expressions—

Shaking their fists, or tap-dancing at street-corners,

While foreign, foreign voices announce the day’s news behind.

And in the old photographs, people have

Hairstyles and clothes so stagey we have to laugh.

Sometimes I think that they’re laughing with us,

It’s all a big joke, of course the screens and glossy pages 

Wasn’t how they lived really. And I can laugh freer 

Knowing that the future will cut us the same slack.