Footnotes of Subconscious Hallucinations

you came. again. hurtling through time. i am tormented by your crown of waves, caging dreams as they fly. my sunken thoughts burn as they go to worlds. we once lived. your mouth of sage speaks lyrical lies so true that I follow. again. to your misplaced youth. you laugh like beached pebble drift, like winds of change. i watch your lips as they kiss foreign words i cannot hear. and we go again to the time of the hangman, the place of the hangman. a buttered noose like your tongue. and then escape to the glacial melt where eyes bind, like knotweed, anchoring root. searing like blistered wood, coloured teal. the inconsistency of your brow suggests an ancestor’s guilt, it shrugs. and we find solitude. i find solitude in your strengthened nape; your suprasternal hollow, laced with silence, and the sweet smell of babies curdled milk; your kindling-sticked clavicle, heavy with the flotsam of unlearned mistakes; your nose, built by splintered mirrors, reflects the backdrop of mountains. and there is calm. in your arms of scales and twining fish and boxed tweed. you offer a pine-cone with the inked hands of the prairie Indian giver. and then you are gone. with the cone. i am alone in the foothills. eagle circling above my head. i pray. i am prey. for him. for you. and i’m on the beach. not knowing how i came here. and the water slaps like the whitecaps of your girth. and my head is in my hands. but they trace the silver birch marks on your stomach. and I can’t see your face. and I don’t know if it is you. and there’s a headstock of wired strings and the sound of devoted woodshedding. and laughter. and I look and it’s coming from me. and I see legs, legs trespassing through broken boundaries. they are going away. bounding on toes twisted with hope. twisted rope. lies bleached, beached. leached by the untruth of its strength, and your innocence. your calculi is revealed by the moon’s glare. its weight of unbearable lightness powers me as i try to hold the unhinged door firm in its frame. as confessions of keeping in and keeping out rattle the letter-box.