The sea bruises the rocks;
Blue, then stills
When someone comes to view.
Waves folding; darkly
Like a hand over a telling mouth; hush.
The sky keeps its blues to itself.
Clouds like cotton chloroform
Held against its mouth.
Dropping into unwanted sleep.
The wind is forced into mouths,
Like a woman stuffing clothes into a suitcase
To throw from a window. The rain
Is attracted to our eyes.
Streetlights become messy sparklers.
Gravestones huddle close
As gossiping children,
One stands away from the others;
Shivering.
Grass whispers in seeming.
Leaning; passing their secrets along
In little notes. A clock flower tears it up;
Tosses it against the wind.
Strangers are notes in a silent
Unpunctuated jazz, then noticing me;
Fall into deep contemplation,
As though tying to place me from somewhere;
Another dream perhaps. I don’t even know
What my own eyes are hiding.
The tracks like dead xylophones
Know their song, all our backgrounds
Lost in the blur of fields that fill in the spaces
Between cities. We step off; having never met,
But we had all seen the young girl chasing
the hat off a doll blown across the platform.
The mother; furious, silent behind the glass.
Her face like a shred balloon
In the hours the train was still
In the dark, off schedule; and only one man
Had panicked, we told each other
Everything. For some, it was as though
They were hearing their own thoughts
For the first time.
A ladybird crawls onto a child’s finger
Like a droplet of water on glass.
Front down in the grass; she blows out
A clock flower, and imagines somewhere,
It starting to snow.
The ladybird opens its wings;
Just like the De Lorean,
The moment when Dorothy sees Technicolor
For the first time is reversed,
And the ladybirds carapace resembles
A painting by H.R. Giger.
Soon the world will do the same;
It will be a boy with blue eyes
That whispers it to her.
His lips will part
and his words will be black,
Detailed, shining.
She will kiss you and say; hush
The sky will be sleeping,
Your bruised skin; renewing itself
Over and over. Your secrets stretching
Their phantom limbs in the
Glittering dark of your mouths.
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