We are laid bare, waiting for renewal;
I collect the receiver, finding the line
Hissing and discontinued.

I take the intonation as circumstance
For something redeemable;
Your hand, a look, an utterance.

*
Exhausting the minute, I gather myself, having left
The pavement to its disclosed symmetry,
A reliance as exact, having no one guess

The lacking which splits us irrevocably,
We group as sleepwalkers, our footsteps slip,
Our eyes study from screen to screen.

*
A television stammers on, its fixed stare
Concentrated like a beam,
The signifiers wearily repair

Our disparate links at a common seam,
We share its bonds without agreement,
Under the same light we are never clean.

*
The film reel runs its cyclical fulfilment,
Reanimated, we are locked into its frames;
Its fictions burn out to empty filaments.

Each snapshot the whole contains
Is an attempt at certainty, we read ourselves
Out of the details, or have them re-made.

*
Already ended, we divide up the remains;
Your skin or mine, itemising touch by touch,
Between us, there are not walls but window panes.

We watch ourselves performing each event
Until our repetitions separate, we are left alone
With any recollection we invent.

Our resolutions are as momentary as language;
We aim to fold them quietly together
Under disused newspapers at train platforms,
So as those we have come for, or happen against,
Will not recognise their discarded significance.

The problem arises as the station divides space;
Having set us at an unforeseen point for the negotiation
Of a ticket, our diligent imaginings pursue
The purchase of a transition, a window seat,
The unknown startling the glass.

Here, the borrowed light is permitted
To flesh out a self outside the self;
The worked impression of its water side
Degenerates with each observer who has come
And left, worrying a slow return to the unclaimed
Remainders of a spent hour,

Vanished among others, that time ago,
While event from event remained divisible,
And progress might have been counted,
Atom by atom, between then and the now;
Collectively, with a mass of remembered looks
And transgressed postal codes,

The lit guest house and shared room
Are placed to assert their histories,
Fearful high tide may finally take them;
The harshness of each geometric shape stencilled
To a background, formulating a town’s hidden trades,
Stilled machinery; out of memory, into existence.

Where the country upturns its palm,
Opened to the weight of another sky,
An intimate desertion holds all that we have
Forgotten, our exhaustion and renewal.

In such exile, the lilac plots its own calligraphy,
So that we must read ourselves into its design
As fugitives, cautious that the soil is not our own,
That the mountain road is bound to its limitations.

Settled into a resurgence like infancy,
We piece together our ghosts who followed the stream,
Who, though lost, can no longer call out, but walk
From the natural, the certainty to which we all head back.

To place love as the conflicting opposite to war is not entirely correct; It is all a matter of scale. War functions with rhetoric and belief, as our relations do, but in its objectives can crush entire states and histories in moving toward an aim. Love can destroy only two; it has a unique and personal method which exists within this interaction only, of which we can assume and speculate, but never truly understand. Do not believe that these casualties are minor or irrelevant, simply because love is not open for the discussions of newspapers. When a man fails in what is basic to him, when love fails, he is then equipped to conduct war.