In the dim hours, you’ll ask for a poem about chips, a request you think will unnerve me, but this morning, after a twilight of revolt and insomnia I realise, after reading the latest figures, that a disarmed heart is luckier than a fused one.

Instead of dallying about feelings, let’s direct the mind’s eye to the mauled trajectory of a love-letter sent twice: sent first into the hands of a stranger, and then into bladed basin of an unhinged roulette. Small difference where things ripen––it’s no more than ink on the page that only in part sketches the leaf, fills its pores, mirrors the paisley lines of apron-covered hands.

A shaving bowl on the porch stays as blue as the midnight passionflower which opens its dark centre against the shadows, disappears into further darkness, and loses everything.