[19 June 2019]
Submitting itself to the idea that time
Builds a barricade against itself, a monument to itself
Written large against the five concrete walls that have long since crumbled away,
Wreathed in smoke and fireflies and plum blossoms
Giving way to an almost that can be eternally grasped
In the spaces in-between your fingers;
The garden is overgrown, but it is alive –
Sorrow and solace and solitude find full their swing
Amidst the poplar and the cedar and the oak and the ash and the rain
And the yew, mesmerised by two competing urges that vie for realisation,
Entangled in a sacred struggle, intertwined in sense and sensuality,
Offering themselves together as a third way, a complete surrender to forces
Found both in the darknesses between the seven sisters and in the dirt plot in your own backyard, dancing a barcarolle
Or a bon or a mazurka, with each step weaving together something
It cannot see,
And can never be anything more or anything less
(Nor have anything more or less to say)
Than the sum of you and me (and everything in-between):
A premonition, never prudish, never ostentatious, not pedantic,
That carries with it a holy host of connotation clasped
Between two trembling hands,
A constellation of fragments (or figments) of a time gone by that may come round again
Lost forever in the perilous state known as absolute certainty
Yet borne aloft and carried ever forward
By the touch of the wine-stained shirt against your skin.
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