These days, those towers are torched and bare.

Their morphologies, lanyards, and ladders are a prayer in the wind.

I stub my toe on grandfather clocks.

Our fumbling words tripping on cliffs, self-blindedly -

Colourless green ideas sleep lovingly.

Can’t quite recall just how a heart can open up

Do we forget or forgive ourselves in rupture or rapture?

When all we’ve got are attempts and intent

Every face is lit with your shadows, peeling off from me.

Clipping your hair on that bitter throne in drawn ecstasy.

Now I’m weeping the rocky shoreline, belly feels like soap.

Rhizomes, Marx, and summer, and the letters we held

Coming unconcealed were pale whispering groves.

The only models that we held were cracked a little.

The only light that crept in was dead of winter.

Endlessly patient, giving hands, devoid of interior.

God, the tide is wading out! This is no answer!

We’re glowing out of here.

(ooooo)

We’re getting out of here, and after that, we’re gone.

Crop your leaving,

our pasty half-wasted breathin’

amber stonefruit northshore seein’

all the light lets in

(And later, in the fall, in Roxbury, after I wake up at 7 and before I wake up at 8 I am in a courtyard as the foliage of 24 autumns decay like the 24 hours of the day - and in shadows or the branchings of treetops I hear some constellation of old and new friends and relations, with as many feasts of cherries and chocolate, of hand-ground beans in January, of overmulled aromatic undrinkable wine. And in some pivot expressible only through dream the courtyard becomes the shoreline where all of the sands are shifting, faces are shifting, and we configure and reconfigure ourselves in the shapes of great poets and great comedians, erasing and rebuilding lives to new records and polemics - and in hindsight the squabbles of young artists will look like the arguments of young children but (as is dreamed before entering the workforce and encountering stunted imaginations built on new foundations of expensive wine, lifestyle podcasts and new phones) at least we’re holding onto something - maybe this isn’t far from why people go to church or wage holy wars - to be young and ignorant and objectively very stupid but to at least really believe in something greater than a lifespan or government. Belano and Echevarne duel on the beach. Driving into Montreal with Patti Smith’s winding unwinding poetry over an eternal two-chord vamp. But now - this feels like an end of days but really it’s August and I have just turned 24 or 25 and behind us there’s a great burning desolate wasteland and ahead a great but terrible mystery that I (and, I suspect, most of us) wouldn’t feel compelled to even examine. Hence the expensive cocktails, the being told, in reference to a Netflix original series, “you’ve got to see it”, the flights towards academia or towards having a family - near these shores there is a storm wall where the dreams of youth crash and break and we’re all cast back into the sea - try again but different next time - until we eventually land different and wake on the shore like one particular burglar of somewhat recent literary acclaim, the grey skies and light rain, yes, but here we’re conscious and breathing and the memories of what lie behind are transmuted into strange visions, and then dreams, and might eventually disappear into the same purgatory from whence they came.)

And when I open my eyes it’s 8 and the aloof grey open rainy morning.