My chair creaks under my weight;

the gravity shifts beneath my words.

My window is submerged beneath hours

of new dusk, laid thick, beyond recognition.

The day is in its mourning dress; its skirt.

It provides me the same security

as if it were I who had my wooden back

against the wall.

I am wading my time, head high,

defiantly avoiding eye contact with the clock,

hanging from the wall,

which buoys on the surface of my mind;

of which I am aware only by the cold drip at the back of my mind,

as it ticks away: a leaky mind,

which at this hour,

by this light,

by this certain stance,

sends visible ripples outward into the sanctuary around me,

to distort a distant star, I wasn’t sure I had seen.
It came to me today;

a glass of water toppled over somewhere,

and I hastened to collect the drops.

Was it the wind, with its breath heavy with condensation,

that had planted that heavy fruit there,

before redressing into its coat of night?

I, for the first time in ages,

hear the bow of the ship breaking through

the perpetual scum of dawn:

the white noise.
I write in light, erasable catches;

in a string of alternating petals,

that I take in the hand

and lower into the waters,

to see what happens.

My hands are sometimes unable – too weak –

to raise the thought to the level

of its conception.

I can’t escape it; my life between times

has become an accommodation.

It had been borne by waves – touched by hands –

to the wrong shore; distant and stretching,

like an Egyptian cat.
It came to me today.

I would have done the same with it as I had the others,

had I known

the next time it may have been that I hug the coast;

and I had been able to swim in the flowing streams of its outlets,

rather than be condemned to drink the brine

from single-handed cups, handed to me,

from my shoulder against the rowlock.

My gravity shifts, beneath the delirium;

my mind is taken up opportunistically

by the sounds from the fog from which I came.

I miss the smell of the brass handle

of a screwed-tight porthole.

The light I have known has been a mere glow,

since I sat beneath your Cephalonian sunlight.