She is eight or nine and she sits
in the playground
on the bench
with the teacher standing a
happy distance
Away and her lunch on her lap
She watches all of the people running
and crawling through legged bridges
to set each other free
and inverting their bodies
so their legs dangle,
confused at their new-found
flight
And she thinks about how
it seems there is a screen
where the
paved slabs meet the grass of fun
and that if she should
press
her face against the divide it should
crackle
the same as the one
At home
and if someone was to sit on the remote
The children would mould into black and white jumping rectangles that shuffle and bump shoulders and hiss.

I love you,
Eternally and really, really.
But somewhere on the way out of
Our message history
And between my lips it got lost
In a translucent bubbled tangle
Of instruction and expectation
And I accidentally
Made it seem like
Hate.

But there's something inescapable
About this deoxyribose stuff.

As though its winding skelter might secretly
Hold all of fate
In its innocent-looking strands.

Kashtanka had lost him on the street
Instinct had stung her mongrel brain
tiny legs had span out of control.
And when she looked back
a grey desert hid her friend,
And had she been human
Tears would have pooled in her
Gummed ducts.
She padded through pavements for dog days as
Umbilical hunger for a scratch behind
Ears pulsed through her vital organs.

Simultaneously, it was ethanol that pulsed
Through Luka's.
And had she known how little
He was thinking of her,
Her tiny canine heart might
Have faltered.

You're asleep, I think
I can tell by the way your lung contents are squeezed from your nostrils
In ever so slightly a more
Forceful motion than when we lie awake
hiding from each other behind eyelids.
And your recycled air brushes my forehead
And I think dustily of how the same molecules
Dance in my lungs
That have visited yours.

And our skin coloured mountains form scapes
On the expanse of wrinkled bed sheet
And I am dead still
As I try to keep this frozen hug
In a capsuled memory
To recall on one of the nights
You can't make it.

He filled up the bathtub with ink
and told her it was art. She asked how they
should wash. He shrugged his shoulders, and
then he mumbled something about buckets.

She cordoned off the  kitchen,
said he was not allowed in and that she
was conducting experiments
regarding the solidity of limes.

He exploded their duvet so
Feathers pirouetted and flew again.
He said they had found their being.
She said that maybe it was time to leave

He followed her down the street, just
a few steps behind. Watching her hair bounce
upon her shoulders he wondered
what would be the best thing for him to say.

She breathes in their shadow-
the terracotta dust sands down her weeping lungs
she curls in silence, tearing.

They have dented her skeleton
enveloped her dreams in a pounding cloak
she crushes her knees with her brow.

In the kaleidoscopic blackness
She dances shapes into her mother’s softened guise
“I am thinking of you”

A crack in the atmosphere barks,
Shooting splinters draw constellations beyond her eyelids
She crawls underneath the table.

She prepares the book to be closed.
Bends back the spine so they will know where she stopped reading
The next half will be different.