Thursday morning. Your alarm doesn't go off. You go barefoot
into a puddle of childhood folly and wish that it would matter, wish that

it could matter.

Outside the puddle
an affair of zugzwang: you hail a cab. It is yellow
like lemons

like a tired crayon color.

You tell the cab driver you want to go here. You say it once, twice. He says
he doesn't know how to go there: which right which left and what footsteps? how quiet?

and you say I'll take you there and you take him there, arm over shoulder, baby wrists,
small-fitting shoes and pinky promises. This is what children are made of, what they are. Childlike,

holy knights, nine o'clock bedtimes, the sometimes, the number of I love you mama's

plus the number of kisses
that say rewind,

rewind.

Your house is made of concrete, your loved ones
made of memory. Impalpable. Unexisting. You do not want it to be like this,

there must be something to change, clothes to unbutton.

The cab driver halts
somewhere else. A somewhere else that you brought him to. It is not here, not at all—so you lie,
so you are outside the puddle, one step, two steps, inside the compulsion—and when he asks you

is this where you wanted to go? Is this the place where?

you say yes, yes, this is where.

It is rehearsed, but you say it too fast. Your throat pours a lingering
of past tense and new furniture. Two third of your body imagines it will return to the ocean

one day out of recklessness and wanting

but for now

it doesn't. For now it weeps
in soft soil

and cinder.