Twenty Possibilities
· 2 min read
Today I decided to look back at what I was writing a year ago. It was this.
Light Bender
Pushing back the dream
feels like lifting a wet sheet from my chest.
There were voices in it—
half-laughed, half-forgotten—
but they scatter
as the real light enters.
Just another morning of
not-quite-enough
sleep.
Light catches the dust
spinning in the slant of the blinds—
not floating,
but circling,
like it remembers
how you used to move through this room.
The bed breathes differently now.
I’ve stopped sleeping on your side
but I haven’t touched your pillow.
It knows your weight too well.
And I still can’t fold your absence
into anything flat enough
to store.
I wouldn’t write this today but I’m not embarrassed by it either. I was still heavily in my post-haiku phase and was busy revisiting old haiku I’d written years ago to see what new shapes I could force them into. Here’s the original:
pushing back the dream
light catching the dust - fireflies
your pillow, untouched
I often think about the move away from this style. It was a completely different writing process than I have now. Today I have less room to hide. I also have poems I could never have written if I still expected lyricism to carry the poem.
I can’t extrapolate from what I’m doing now to what I might be doing next year. I’ll come back and read this then.
For now, this is where I am:
Icosahedron
Twenty possibilities.
I sit by your bed
and shake.
Reply hazy, try again.
I shake again.