nihil ex nihilo

I like to think about the lives of small things names and objects that pass into obscurity, dreams never realized for they were lost upon waking Is that the cruelty of dawn? Time’s inevitable effacement - that a morning will come when I realize I forgot my mother’s laugh, a lover’s hand, the cumulative moss of my living, the tree’s underside, a place where a giant rests, a home for smaller things: creatures, invisible insect work, the memory of a lover’s hands

night after night, an empty room, and dreams shaped from the soft melancholy of wildflower fields, the silky poppies, the grazing herds of goats that people the side of the road dark’s phenomenon: my heart turns into a toad, I croak and croak, all loneliness and want, an emergence from startouched waters, a terrible beauty an embarrassment of abundance, I grow and grow

let me collect those flowers still, on those hills I’ll never return to - in that time that nearly never was - yellow, teethlike, rows and rows of graves poke out haphazardly: childhood

how had I hollowed out my hands so efficiently - I did not know loneliness could be so exact like a scalpel or a forest violently sundered of its trees - I hear their thousand deaths and the names whispered in-between