The sun is a pulsing chorus of unwanted radiance. I do not

go to the sea but stay dry and steeped in a shimmering

migraine. Temples nettled by the carefree sashay of pines.

Flinching each time the cockatoos cast their shrieks against

the fractured window. The unlatched skull accrues a residue

of bruised nights. The mind lists. Honestly, the soft animal

of my body is fucking tired. Is mostly shark and knows only

that it must keep swimming with parted teeth. Headlong

verb cruising for a tidy noun. Finding only the whole

simmering ocean. Abundance as persecution. Disguised in

in the emphatic inertia of italics. Dream of being the kind

of person who naps with abandon. Turn instead to the screen

spangled with leaky metaphors. Suddenly like her, the tears

assemble on the precipice. Salinity scales the ducts, ancient

and perpetual. An unresolved bluff, where sentiment drags

on, alluvial. How predictable. The rush to the mother wound.

Or not. Just a false distillation which in health will boil away

revealing no more and no less than the veracity of loss.

Was cautioned against careening towards this. Yet moth-like,

circle the warm illumination. Or is it the other way around?

Always hurtling down the same road of dusty quarter-truths

and unmeasured parallax. Where the terrible brilliance

of summer dusk shatters in my outstretched hands. Finally

a bright, precise pain that comes of glancing the sheer

contemptuous potential only ever born in the crucible

of love. Photophobia is not a fear of images, rather

an exquisite intolerance of light. Ambivalence is not

mixed feelings. It is a car crash of blinding desires

where nothing good survives.