...is a long corridor
stretching
shadows
to snapping
just a tendril
shimmer with dewdrops
spark-gap
the node flashes between these
mirrors each
a cobweb jerking
a lung flooding, a wave collapsing
all words codified
first the p words b words plosified
when you look when you stop
time and fix
the moment like this, you see
it's like this that all possible routes
were travelled to this point
the poem of this point
a frozen frame
one circuit sparking
encoding a whole,
a fishdrop is this word
this face-down-study word this
library Larkin cup of tea word
this shuffle of an overcoat word
heading
home in the half light
a symphonic dusk of starlings
to a lonely house word
each to each
smoke flows back down
the chimney, coughs
are sucked back in
lungs filled with expectoration
where grow inflections of undifferentiated
word tissue, stem-words
that may become all issue, lexica-stock
of the probable, no men
clat ure of collapsed
wordwave
the pandorad hoard scattered
the hope-spasm of a diaphragm
the formula-shuck
of a buccal chasm
bilabial plosive
orgasm unvoiced
merely fricative thrust, close rounded and schwa
vowel freak-vowel schwa ugh lateral
ugh approximant of consonantal drift
gondwanaword of a pacific
rimshot acoustic
of blowface composition spit it out spirant
spit it out dearie, better
out than in
schwa (I know you not) bleak Blairword
thrusting bronchia-beyond-body-branch and broken
and web and filament and stem
and monofilament and unchained
polymer of word
enter your ear-anvil
still hooked umbilical in my
mindlung my voice chamber, still
tugging and coming, coming hammered
loose
placental
bloodroot to become
now yours this word delivered
of the systemic etymology
shivered into echoism
of silence,
sigh lens,
silens
word ecology fish-flapping now
a last flap the pin fixing the wingfin
to the specimen board we bends
creaking to look what it became
in the fixing, that fix
when all roads just stop
mouths go silent, clouds crystallise
as usual the miracle
a brown, dull thing
a word no one would use
in a brown dull poem even
not even
in our wildest sparks
cinders.
