For C.


I watch as you recede from me,

pen in hand, trailing white ink such that it

blackens, burns, evaporates. I see your words

scatter to letters unmoving, their texture none.

They were never coherent in structure to me.


Whence blossomed that dream, in which

our tongues, they were the same? Curious

calm, speaking a shared riddle of fiction

that realizes, here now. Now I speak you the riddle.

We change and are changed.


Fiction is the poison, the stain of our real,

your eyes, my thoughts; its antidote, for we

invent fragments, under the weeping tree, your

event that guides your path and pieces them into ghosts,

till our paths stray, pharmakon, hymen, ghost.


The ghost in our events: but it breathes the air,

springs the trees, withers at end. Momentary shine,

idea's halo, devoid of all but a centre. Our shared tongue.

Never will you come back to our shared tongue.


I watch as I recede before you.

I conceive you in thought;

phantom, never really but shimmering, forever lost

in your shadow's light.