poem on love/memory

what is a room if not a room?

a storage facility?

you know

even those aren’t loveless –

your lows

and sleeplessness search out

its immanence in everything that’s good

its immanence in the smell of lonely air.

nothing is loveless

but us

nothing is loved

except by us –

reconcile yourself to this in time

and you’ll do better, be better –

you loved her last night

you loved her the night before

you loved her the most this morning

a colourless rainbow reanimated at last

only to hate the bedroom you grew up in now?

lead your life on a syllogism’s logic

not a human’s logic

take a whole bunch of drugs

be a whole lot of uncaring about things

worth caring for – you know the fate

you’re signing up to with that awful signature.

reach up and trace the architraves 

with your fingers instead – the ones as high

as Saturn when you were young –

don’t let the hurt

in your belly stop you reaching

don’t let the dust plant death beneath your touch.

give the cat a chance to burrow in

and under your piles of luggage

to the little spaces he longs for –

shoe openings, toiletry bags –

things you think he calls attention to as

a cursed envoy of the force that says, don’t go –

don’t go – people said that at the party

when you were standing on a chair

breath steaming like your speech into the ether

one of the chair legs had lost its plastic cap

siphoning dirt through the hole like sausage meat

cylindrical dirt forced up by your falling body

but you didn’t fall, and the only ones who meant it

didn’t speak, and the roses on the shirt worn by the man

walking by your window with his dog

start to bleed like storming from afar

and her silk bandana falls from the sky’s yawning mouth

and the heater hums and then his arms and legs aren’t –

as something material he isn’t going to make it

and his unmaking celebrates her –

the last page of the notebook he drops

celebrates her and so, soon, will its burning

or evanescence. you watch the world make

room for her water droplet body – name erasure

history without love – name after that state

of being without her, before all the dreams

you had in this orange room for twenty years –

more suffused with your dreams than any other

space outside your mind and outside hers –

reach – the doorknob’s warm, the air full, the dirt sweet.