cruel lapse
poetry is a vehicle that i drive past your house when you're not in there.
in the deeper pockets of time, that one yawning second on the trampoline when i sink into the mat — gathering all the weight that i otherwise, foolishly, try to keep off the ground i walk, off the bodies that i lean against in search of respite, off my mother's furniture — i wish to sink into the earth to be cradled by everything that was once alive; or be catapulted across the satellite network and into the blinking shavings of matter. such is this lulling, lilting, faraway stretch of december night when i still have your number on my phone, i could wake up on the other side where i'm still the first person you think of.
The distinction between the past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion, said old albert, time is not linear: because tonight i'm in a car with you on our way back from biology while it's pouring outside, praying to some god i don't invest faith in to make the traffic last for another hour, for joji to sing his four minute song for another forty. because on my nineteenth birthday morning i was in grade five hating you because you smiled like nothing ever costed you. because next summer i will be on the kamikaze with our elbows locked and a tombstone lodged in my throat, thinking i only love you less than my baba and maybe that is not enough to let you go.
i used to think time is linear. i iterated and reiterated, and i ran with the notion that if i started from the finish line—then i only had to reach you and hold on. but i was mistaken. there is no track. there is you walking me home again and i'm for once not thinking of what i will do once this is over and we linger at the mouth of the alley as i hope and fear that they see right through me: we are not tangential and we are hurtling into each other. time is not linear, it is singular.
(but in one of these scattered segments the elevator fell and i was afraid but we laughed till the world collapsed upon us. i would never have to learn to not know you. i would have the right to your sadness. we would be linear.)