The words

The words spread through the air
like filaments.
Like stiff, delicate glass fibres
exhaled from a crystal lung,
like the opposite of asbestos,
a brittle, fractured cloud, breathed out
from a clean hollow interior, from caves
that lead to forgotten palaeolithic tales
concealed in the dark
with the marvels and monsters
scrawled on the wall at the back of the mind
for millennia until this moment,
this telling, the words tumbled
and turned and glistened
and gradually connected in mid-air,
the tip of one coming to rest
on the middle of another, and so on,
as they floated downward,
making miniature bird skeletons
escaped from an imagined menagerie,
a flock of tiny fossil pterodactyls, gliding,
until bridges of meaning slowly formed
and lay one on top of another
and all of a sudden, assymmetric, doomed,
like a strangely lopsided, drunken snowflake
caught in a momentary shaft of light,
posed for one brief instant,
- blink and you miss it -
a poem is formed,
before the filaments collapse
into a heap on the floor
to be swept away
with the rumour and the gossip and the lie
and all the malice that we rearrange
rather than eradicate.

Perhaps we will find them the next day
like the lost eyelashes of a history of wishing.
Perhaps we will find them, woven into a promise
floating in the gutter on a discarded leaflet
their meaning discounted, ten percent off,
for a limited period only, while stocks last.
Will we recognise them? Will we see in them
the words that were once a poem?

Safe

I have always loved this sound
since before I can remember:
the rain on the window,
the skylight, the roof, outside.
I force myself into the edge
where the bed meets the wall,
make myself as small as possible,
make myself vanish into the sound,
lose myself in its amniotic embrace.

The rain

The rain fell
half a day too late,
the difference
between falling on fire
and falling on ash.
Twelve hours earlier
we would have blessed this rain.
Now it may as well
never fall again.

(Written the morning after the June 2018 Glasgow School of Art Fire)

... and it was all a dream

We say words
one after another
to describe what happens
all at once
so all our worlds
are imagined worlds
and we are the people
we imagine live in them.