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New Poem by Todd Swift

first draft of my first poem in months...



As ‘Heavenly Bodies’ by Tamaryn played

I came out of myself, lost the way, was the river in the middle
of the road, the third movement, the moving van, a targeted thing,
gossamer wing, the last to fire on the smoking man; fiddle
with your days if you can, until you break a string.  I was giddy,

lost, grown relatively fat, measureless to myself, on a high
shelf, but toppling; I fell in love most days, many ways;
should have been a donut glaze; I floated like heat haze; broke
laws like others gauze; runners ran through the tape of my dreams.

Was seamless, fragmented, and head of the department of looms;
I ran from hall to hall patterning rooms; was a shoe-gaze instrumental.
They could have put me down as mental if they’d caught me then.
But I was so alone in the music of dreamy unstoppable procession

of being forgotten; a shoe in the back; coin under the shoe; more me
than you, but less of me than no one at all; the sigh before the squall;
the breath before the rattle; endless mindless universal prattle:
mitochondrion and collider, spermatid and nucleus, spattering.


poem by Todd Swift; revised online 28/11/2012

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