WAKING IN THE PRECEDING
Hello my forever ago, don’t worry,
you won’t be reading this much longer.
You will have already returned
in the body of a snowcloud
which is suggestively, fashionably,
only ever one second old.
Yes darling, it’s me, it says as proof
that in space, though there are many
silences, fleeting isn’t the opposite
of infinite, but its perfect match.
Stanching the muscle to work it.
A memory among many I hold
is you and another death-being
drinking cold windowsill
glasses of water, causing shivers
up and down the once two-thing
we say goodbye to by slowly undressing
from the wonderful softness of our own
gendery animalia. Let’s light
the end of a candle
with another longer candle
while we drift in the old ways
like these Jovian diffusions.
Remembering, remembering
your gathering body framed
by the door I ogle daily
as part of my reality of starving
on flowers and realism.
Though not wishing to answer
anything that thrusts too readily
toward any subject, I was once
helped to choose to never again use
I in which
I is not my first person.
Everything permutes
faster than you can imagine.
But in this kind of blindness
we will no longer surveil
we will no longer widely steer
toward avoidance, we will become
happy, satisfied and uplifted
communications professionals
like the back-of-office sunbeams
that set the cover to glow.
Contained,
not constrained, by the past.
Childhood I might enter
if I could confiscate the adult sadness.
Adulthood I might enter
if I could confiscate the childhood sadness.
Outside this type of weather
the hare sharply dodges the dog then lifts
over the answer to the physical reconcilement
of its own questioning. Are we the physics
of our dreams? The ones that keep using
sadness for erotics. That isn’t said quite right
but I think you understand.
In the movement anyhow.
Author’s Bio
Ali Blythe is editor-in-chief of the Claremont Review, an international magazine for young writers. His first book, Twoism, was a finalist for the BC Book Awards, and he received an honour of distinction from the Writers Trust of Canada for emerging LGBTQ writers.