Adam Cornford
Late Show
One night the inventor bolted the doors
& left us in our wrappings
to feel our way through the calibrated silence.
Overhead the veins in the clouds
were tied off:
we stumbled out of our corners,
bruising ourselves against magnets & spent lightning.
Soon we were staggering into each other,
crippled mummies
trying to share the slippery rack we were made on.
We scraped a code of insults out of our throats
& began to coccoon ourselves
With old plastercasts, wire,
the skins of failures.
Now & then we would collide in the dark:
I threw histories of zinc at your footsteps,
you tossed back pale futures swimming in jars.
We hid, but already
the blindfolds were shredding from my fingers,
your tongue stirred in its cave as if after winter.
Bit by bit we picked off
crumbling patches & coils rusted to sand;
then the bandages, unwinding
like the long staircases inside our cells.
The inventor, watching in his secret lens
noticed nothing
but rubble, gauze looping down
out of hollow air.
Only we can see each other now
as we unfurl our eyes & raise them into the wind,
as we breathe light.
Page(s) 67
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