i am mapping hyperlinks
to your skin
all morning
there is nothing but
indigestion and
google earth
a sign of things to come.
somehow the words
just seemed to stop
before they’d left
your mouth
i could see them falling
like old fruit
into silence
and i tried to guess the colour
of the vowels.
i felt a burst of heat
from the space where you were
standing
there was a distant ringing
and i thought about
poems
that were more like pop songs.
we couldn’t put
it back together
with time
or even with
words
everything you thought
at that moment
was somehow
interrupted
like data flows
or the way frames of film
fit together to make movement.
i think they call it
‘the persistence of vision’,
each moment
blurring
into the last.
we wrote with pencil
on sound
and i said things
aloud
that i wouldn’t even think
the quickest way to remember
is to try and forget
you had something
stuck in your front teeth -
to me this was a sign
i used a typewriter ribbon
as a blindfold
and pointed myself to the sun.
so much of
going away
is coming back
again.
we spent hours
tidying our house
until it no longer
felt like home.
we washed away hallways
and let the paint
fall from walls where we
found ourselves,
camped.
your voice &
my eyes open
waiting for the silence to stop.
i left the city early
and watched them roll the clocks back
to the start.
trains collapsed into houses
with the sound of sign language
& you, barely awake.
it all started
when i forgot your name.
we survived a room full of people
by ignoring each other
& waited so long
that it began to feel like action,
began to feel like memories eroding.
a simple virus,
leaving only an outline.
a hypodermic needle.
a man sleeping under a tree.
a tag cloud of memories
distributed in the mail.
there were weather patterns,
anatomical diagrams & other
continuations of science.
i held my breath & thought
of all the things
which are not quite photographs,
but always framed.