Head space

When did the wind
gaffer two Stanley knives together
to slice me like this?
Fingers reddened
to clay; but the metaphorical hi-viz and
hard hat untouched in the back of the car
we waited for, huddling into each other’s coats,
as the clouds of our breath mixed
with low mist the others
shone through:
beams of light,
incalculable origins.

Look – a kid in Burberry burqa;
a dead or dying tree; the scar felt
as a single, raised tramline
above the neck; the endless kind
of night.

There’s a place we stand
so the flatness of the earth
doesn’t seem so bad.
Our feet are bound in cotton
and we might not sink,
the carpet rubbing into dust.

You have found a way to see
the whole as one still image,
but still you wait, the shimmer
of the blue screen a flinch in some
malevolent game, a dream
from which you cannot wake,
from which, had you the option,
you would not.