A Poem

You Can Take Me Anywhere

When I hold you in my mind, you are
in travel. Looking straight ahead, sometimes
fidgeting: two fingers squeezed round one nose, eyebrows
risen then not. Once or twice, you
turn to me, laugh and squint, like my words
cut through some silent barrier. The smell
of honeysuckle in spring time, sweet, seductive,
malevolent. Wind from in between
the underneath and above, or at least that space
not so far from one's heart. The skeleton
of interstate travel outside whatever window
we sit beside, I am calm. I could hold my
breath and lock my eyes shut, still walk down any street
without shouting, without Fall.

Yet the slumbering moments in my mind hold a dark temptation,
to fall into a night-time in-between
of losing and never lessened, of bones and
ribs and veins made of metal, of knowing, somehow
that tomorrow we will wake, and that today
will never come. With so many steps still past this tunnel
I think, in this lucid memory,
you are an exotic invasive to this self-system.
What blooms when the seeds of not-despair have spread?