Elements

Turning rooms upside down,
rearranging the way we live
seems a natural thing to do
when we give way to petty griefs.

The frustration of what wasn’t,
a proximity that came so close.
Words moved from to room to room
until they find a place less lost,

less obstructive. The change reveals
what the habit had been hiding,
a patch of damp, patterns of mould,
which identify whose side was whose.

There is still the sense of something
absent, an element that was there
before but no longer, perhaps
the simple contradiction of being and not being.